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Essays at Large 



Works by J. C. Squire 

POEMS 

POEMS : FIRST SERIES Second Bditio}! 

A Collection of Poems written 1905-1918 

POEMS : SECOND SERIES 

A Collection of Poems written 1918-1921 
THE BIRDS AND OTHER POEMS SeCOtld ThoUSatld 

Poems written 1918-1919 

THE SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST FoUfth Sdii'tOtl 

THE MOON 

Also in a Limited Autographed Edition on large 
paper 

ESSAYS 

THE GOLD TREE AND OTHER STUDIES 

Limited Autographed Edition 

LIFE AND LETTERS 

BOOKS IN GENERAL : FIRST SERIES Third Edition 
By Solomon Eagle 

BOOKS IN GENERAL : SECOND SERIES 
BOOKS IN GENERAL : THIRD SERIES 

PARODIES 

COLLECTED PARODIES SeCOttd SdittOti 

IMAGINARY SPEECHES 

STEPS TO PARNASSUS 

TRICKS OF THE TRADE SevCtlth Sditiotl 



THE COLLECTED POEMS OF JAMES ELROY FLECKER t 

Edited, with an Introduction 

SELECTIONS FROM MODERN POETS 

The abo'^e are all published by Hodder and Stoughton 
with the exception oj "Flecker' s Poems" and ''Selec- 
tions from Modern Toets " {Sec>(^er), and " Steps to 
Parnassus," " Imaginary Speeches," and ''The Sur- 
vival of the Fittest" {/I lien and jjnmn) 



Essays at Large 

By Solomon Eagle 








NEW XBJr YORK 
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 

{Printed in Gnat Britain.} 












Gilt 



The Westminster Press 

411a Harrow Road 

London W 9 



TO 

James Murray Allison 



PREFATORY NOTE 

MOST of these papers are reprinted from 
the Outlook ; a jFew, which seemed akin to 
the others, appeared in Land and Water, 
which died under the burden. 

S. E. 
1922. 



«^ 



CONTENTS 






PAGE 


Reading in Bed 


I 


Life at the Mermaid 


6 


The New Style of Memoir 


12 


Pronunciation 


18 


By Lewis Carroll 


24 


Press Cuttings 


30 


On Knowing Authors 


35 


A Return 


40 


The King of Prussia 


46 


John Pomfret 


51 


Candid Biography 


56 


Rejected Contributions 


63 


An Indian Bard 


68 


A Trick of Memory 


74 


Prize Poems 


78 


Burton's Anatomy 


83 


A Veterinary Surgeon 


88 


The Lonely Author 


93 


Critics in 1820 


97 


An Old Calendar 


103 


The Seaman's Progress 


108 


;£i5.ioo 


113 


Dickens's Friends 


119 


Poetry and Commonplace 


125 


Shakespeare and the Second Chamber 


130 


On Being a Jonah 


135 


Valour and Vision 


141 


Real People in Books 


147 


Railroadiana 


152 


On Being Somebody Else 


158 



XI 



CONTENTS 






PAGE 


A Commonplace Book 


163 


Surnames 


168 


A Translator of Genius 


174 


Authors' Relics 


180 


The Librarian's Hard Lot 


185 


Disraeli's Wit 


191 


An Edifying Classic 


196 


Christmas Cards 


201 


Quotations 


207 



xn 



READING IN BED 

DISCUSSION amongst human beings is 
very difficult. There were three of us, and 
we talked about reading in bed. At the end 
of a quarter of an hour it dawned on us — we had 
had faint glimmerings of this before — that we had 
been talking about different things. 

" What is the best thing to read in bed ? " It 
sounds a sufficiently concrete item in the agenda. 
But we had overlooked the fact that men might read 
in bed with different motives. " If you were staying 
in a country house for the night, and found one of 
those little sliding bookcases on the table beside 
your bed, what would you like to find in it ? " That 
also looked definite enough. But neither was really 
sufficiently precise. No allowance was made for 
temperament. 

Of course, we all know what we should find in it. 
Granted a cultivated household, where the furniture 
was good, the walls tastefully hung, and the host 
and hostess an fait with modern literature and the 
latest political thought, very little latitude is con- 
ceivable. Either the small bookcase would contain 
two volumes of Mr. Shaw's plays, a volume of Mr. 
Granville Barker's, some Tchekov short stories, a 
book of sketches by Mr. Galsworthy, and a faded 
Ibsen volume published by the firm of Walter Scott; 
or else it would contain Mr. Chesterton's " The 
Defendant " and "A Miscellany of Men," Mr. 
Belloc's " On Anything " and " Hills and the Sea," 
a volume of essays by Mr. Lucas, and " Idlehurst." 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

Stay ! there is a third possibility : Wordsworth, 
" Rab and His Friends," the " VaiHma Letters " 
and the " Essays of Elia," with Matthew Arnold's 
" Essays in Criticism," and something of Walter 
Bagehot's. These are what one would, and does 
repeatedly, find. The question is : What would one 
wish to find, and why ? 

I gather that there are three objects in reading in 
bed. Some men pursue only one, some pursue each 
in turn, some have two or more in mind as alter- 
natives at any particular moment. Firstly, you may 
read in bed in order to send yourself to sleep at the 
earliest possible moment. Well, there are occasions 
when one feels like that. I myself have for many 
years kept beside my pallet Kant's " Critique of 
Pure Reason." I have never got through it. I always 
begin again at the same place, to wit, the first line. 
The result is that I probably know the first three 
pages as well as any man alive, and that I am totally 
ignorant as to what comes after. I may say in self- 
defence that I am not in the least degree curious 
about what comes after ; but there it is. That is 
the first mode, and that the first object of reading in 
bed. Next there is the moderate course and the 
sensible object of the man who likes to read a little 
in bed, but does not want to be deprived of what 
grandmother would have called his beauty sleep. 
The book must not be boring ; it must not be too 
exciting. It must be interesting on every page but 
dramatic nowhere ; there must be a stream of event 
but no definite break. Well, I do not really think 
that those volumes of essays quite suit the case. The 
end of an essay usually comes just before that fatal, 



READING IN BED 

final blink, and one wants to begin another. What 
one needs is the book that can be begun anywhere 
and dropped anywhere ; and I can conceive no 
books better in that regard than Boswell, Gibbon, 
Hakluyt, and Lucas's " Life of Lamb." These are 
so long and so uniform that there is no hope of finish- 
ing them in a night, and no fear of worrying about a 
climax not reached ; and they are so good that one 
never minds if one does read the same pages over 
and over again. I found, in our discussion, that each 
of these species of nocturnal reading was favoured 
by one of my friends. But for myself I shamelessly 
confessed that, however tired I might be, I should 
always, even were the whole contents of the British 
Museum at call from my bed, ask for a shocker. 
Give me " Bulldog Drummond," " Station X," or 
" Trent's Last Case " and I will read in bed until 
dawn. Let sleep go. Let the morrow's duties go. 
Let health, prudence, and honour go. The bedside 
book for me is the book that will longest keep me 
awake. 

It is a large subject, and one seldom discussed. 
Hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of people 
every night in England read something in bed. They 
say nothing about it except " I read for a little last 
night and then slept Hke a top," or " I didn't feel 
like going to sleep last night, so I read for a bit," or 
" I began reading so-and-so in bed last night, and 
damn the book, I couldn't get to sleep until I 
finished it." Usually nothing at all is said ; if any- 
thing is said it is very little. Yet what a large slice 
of each of our lives has gone in this harmless occu- 
pation. We get our clothes off. We get our pyjamas 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

on. We wind our watches. We arrange the table and 
the light and get into bed. We pile up, or double 
up, the pillows. Then we settle down to it. Some- 
times the book is so exciting that all thought of sleep 
fades away, and we read on oblivious of everything 
except the unseen menace in that dark house, the 
boat gliding stealthily along that misty river, the 
Chinaman's eyes peering through that greenish- 
yellow fog, or the sudden crack of the revolver in 
that den of infamy. Sometimes we read for a while 
and then feel as though we could go peacefully to 
sleep. Sometimes we struggle desperately to gum 
our failing attention to the acute analysis and safe 
deductions of our author. Our eyes squint and swim. 
Our head dizzies. We feel drunk, and, dropping 
the book aside from lax hands, just manage to get 
the Hght out before falling back into a dense and 
miry slumber. We all know those fights against in- 
evitable sleep, those resolves to reach the inaccessible 
end of the chapter, those swimmings in the head, 
those relapses into the gulf of slumber. And we all 
know those long readings when the mystery and 
suspense of the text so excite us that every creak of 
the stair and every fluttering of the pertinacious 
moths makes the heart stand still, and then keeps 
it beating hard for minutes. We have all turned 
the light out just in time ; and we have all turned 
it out from boredom, or in an access of determined 
common-sense, and then turned it on again to re- 
sume the dreary reading where we left the piece of 
paper or the pencil in the page. But we seldom talk 
about it. It is a part of our really private lives, which 
include also our operations in the bath-room, and 



READING IN BED 

our contrivances for keeping, at certain moments, 
our clothes together. These are universal experiences 
which each man thinks pecuUar to himself, yet 
which hardly anybody ever thinks worth mentioning. 



LIFE AT THE MERMAID 

AT breakfast, with an author more venerable, 
I opened a bookseller's catalogue which had 
just reached me from America. It contained 
many interesting things : manuscripts of Spaniards 
of whom I had never heard, early editions of old 
English writers of whom I had barely heard, desir- 
able editions of the classics, this, that, and the other, 
and some first editions of illustrious contemporaries. 
I knew — I usually know as much — that I should 
not bother to write for anything from that catalogue, 
and could not pay for it if I did ; nevertheless I pro- 
ceeded like a caterpillar through the items. As I 
turned the tenth page I had a slight shock — it wasn't 
really surprising — at seeing six times repeated the 
name of my companion. He is a man of genius, and 
it is all quite fit and proper that the collectors of 
America should give, or at least be asked to give, 
considerable sums of money for the first editions of 
his books. " Hallo," I said, " they seem to be pay- 
ing through the nose now for your first editions." 
" Ah ? " he said. " Of course," I went on — and I 
was merely stating a fact — " the prices are nothing 
like so big as our grandchildren will pay." His 

answer was " Bigger fools they ! " 

There suddenly flashed on me a vision of those 
grandchildren — a vision, be it admitted, based on 
the assumption that our civilisation will endure, 
which is not certain. I saw a spacious room with 
glazed bookcases, and a young bibliophile showing 
another his rare editions and tooled bindings. They 

6 



LIFE AT THE MERMAID 

fingered one after another, and at last they came to 
the first scarce work of my friend. I heard the con- 
versation. " What did you give for that ?" "Eighty- 
five pounds." " It's nice to have it with his signature 
in, knowing that he handled it. If he knew he might 
be consoled for the way people underrated him when 
he was alive." Probably there will be such conver- 
sations. There may be a Life of my friend ; the 
Life may include some of his intimate correspond- 
ence and alleged specimens of his " table-talk." 
They will have a pretty good idea of his character 
and his genius, they will know his pedigree, the state 
of his finances, his goings to and fro on the earth. 
But with their inadequate information and their 
incorrigible romanticism they will have no notion 
as to what his real daily talk was like, as distin- 
guished from his more intense conversation. Do 
we really know any dead man in his daily life ? Dr. 
Johnson, some would say. We know his voice and 
his habits of mind better than most people's ; yef 
even Boswell did not take down anything unless it 
seemed to be a little above the ordinary level, to have 
some special point or value. A gramophone record 
of Dr. Johnson's words through a whole day would 
supply us with something quite new. It would also 
diminish a little Dr. Johnson's apparent stature. 
We see the great dead as larger than human because 
we have of them, however much we have, only a 
refined essence. When we do really meet an ordinary 
fact — such as the fact that Mary Shelley irri- 
tated Percy (in the throes of composition) by 
asking him to fetch her cotton-reel from the corner 
where it had rolled — it stands out as something 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

very illuminating. Meditating thus I attended a 
literary dinner, a regular dinner, one of a series that 
might conceivably be mentioned (for the oddest 
things turn up) in future literary memoirs and then 
in the histories. Good things were said, interesting 
books were discussed : but not all the time, no, not 
all the time. And I wondered what the meetings of 
the Romantics were actually like, and what those 
evenings at the Mermaid Tavern. We know there 
were great times at the Mermaid, and one in fond 
reminiscence said that the frequenters would put 
their whole souls in a jest. Nevertheless other things 
were said, and I conceive that there were tracts of 
conversation like this : 

Shakespeare : I don't think much of this fish, 

Ben Jonson : The fish has been filthy the last 
three times, 

Shakespeare : It's always like that at these 
places. They do you very well to start with, and 
when they think they've got you fixed it goes oflF. 

Drayton : The waiters are getting pretty 
uncivil, too. Especially that ugly brute with the 
squint. I distrust that man. 

Ben Jonson : I'm sick of the place. It's no 
better than the Sun was. 

Shakespeare : But is there anywhere else that 
we could try ? Is it not better to endure the ills 
we have than fly to others that we know not of ? 

Ben Jonson : You might leave it to somebody 
else to quote your works. 

Shakespeare : I don't think the company has 
any right to complain so long as I don't quote 
yours. 

8 



LIFE AT THE MERMAID 

Chapman : Oh, shut up, you two, you're always 
at it ! 

Beaumont : We never seem to be able to discuss 
anything properly here. The point is, can we get a 
better dinner anjrwhere else, and, if so, where ? 

Fletcher : At the same price, Francis ? 

Beaumont : Of course. Jack, that goes without 
saying. 

Chapman : Why shouldn't we go to the Devil ? 

Shakespeare : Speak for yourself. 

Ben Jonson : It's a pity you can't remember 
to keep your weaker witticisms for the theatre, 
where they seem to like them. 

Chapman : The Devil really is rather a good 
place. Mrs. Jones is a nice old woman, and her 
cellar is extraordinarily good. 

Shakespeare : It may be, but all I can say is 
that the last pint of sack I drank there nearly 
poisoned me. It seems to me that we'd better 
stick where we are. But it's a rotten place. 

All : Yes, rotten 1 

Shakespeare : When's your new play coming 
on, Ben ? 

Ben Jonson : Oh, he says he thinks he'll get 
it on next week ! It's a lie, of course. These man- 
agers make me sick. If he doesn't hurry up I shall 
publish it first. 

Shakespeare : Oh, I shouldn't do that ! 

Ben Jonson : Oh, we know you wouldn't ! 
You'd never publish it at all. You'd leave it to 
some swindling printer to get it out, full of mis- 
prints. Personally I happen to be interested in 
what I write. 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

Chapman : Oh, for God's sake stop quarrel- 
ling ! You make the place a bear-garden. What's 
the news about Spain ? 

Donne : Nothing doing. I saw the Lord 
Chamberlain yesterday and he said he'd just seen 
old Gondomar, and he seemed very amiable. 
There's some talk of the Prince of Wales marry- 
ing an Infanta. 

Shakespeare : It's enough to make poor old 
Drake turn in his grave. 

Ben Jonson : Oh, you're a sentimentalist ! 

Shakespeare : Chuck it about ; I don't mind. 
All I know is that the more I see of politics the 
less I like them. 

Drayton : Nice boy, the Prince of Wales. 

Beaumont (whispering loudly to Fletcher) : 
No wonder Drayton thinks so, considering that 
the kid has just given him fifty quid to help pub- 
lish his rotten epic. 

Drayton : I heard what you said. It's not 
true. It's all that Browne's doing. He's always 
putting these absurd stories about. 

Shakespeare : Don't take it to heart, Mike ; 
they're only pulling your leg. 

Ben Jonson : Faugh ! Mutton again. I don't 
believe they've given us anything but mutton for 
eighteen months, 

Shakespeare : Mutton is so sheep, you see. 

{Loud howls.) 

Chapman (to Drayton) : How many lines is 
your epic ? 

Drayton : I can't tell yet, the second part 
isn't finished. I should think it might run to ten 
thousand. jq 



LIFE AT THE MERMAID 

Chapman : My Homer is more than that, I 
should think. 

Shakespeare : Such long lines too. If you were 
being paid by the line I should advise your split- 
ting them in halves. 

Fletcher : Do you know Mary Fitton|? 

Donne : No ; I think Shakespeare doesj; I've 
heard rather odd things about her. Don't you 
know Miss Fitton, WilHam ? 

Shakespeare : No ; I've just met her. She 
seemed to be rather an ass ; clever, of course, 
but boring. She will insist on talking about books 
all the time. I met her at the Bacons'. 

Fletcher (to Beaumont) : I don't suppose 
there's anjrthing in it. This town is a fearful place 
for gossip. 

Shakespeare : I say, you people, I'm awfully 
sorry to break up the party, but I've got to get 
back to Stratford by next Friday and a man has 
offered me a Uft. I simply must get there. 

{Rises to go.) 

Donne : What's the hurry ? Don't tell us you 
ever do anything at Stratford. 

Shakespeare : Oh, it's a deal with a man about 
wool ! I don't see why one shouldn't turn an 
honest penny when one gets the chance. 

Beaumont : Well, just one more, WilHam. 

Shakespeare : All right, just one more, but it 
will have to be a quick one. . . . 

I have telescoped history a little, and I have been at 
no pains to achieve an archaistic realism by sprinkHng 
the dialogue with marrys, gulls, wittols, and argosies. 
But I daresay that is what the Mermaid was like. 

II 



THE NEW STYLE OF MEMOIR 

IT is about time somebody made a heavy pro- 
test against the latest form of memoir — the 
contemporary memoir in which the author takes 
advantage of opportunities which have been given 
to him as a private person, pillories those who have 
innocently admitted him to their homes, repeats 
strictly private conversations, or describes purely 
private assemblies out of which he would have been 
promptly booted if anybody present had known 
what he was up to. There have been four or five of 
these in the last few years. We all read them (we 
can't help it), and they are commercially profitable. 
Nothing but a dead set against offending authors 
will stop their increase. 

Now I need scarcely say that I am not arguing 
against the recording of any and every event, literary 
or political, likely to be of historical interest : of any 
dinner party, conversation, secret intrigue, odd, 
strange, significant, or diverting word or deed of 
any species whatever. We can say what we like about 
the dead. Doubtless De mortiiis nil nisi bonuni has an 
element of truth in it : we should be especially 
careful about calumniating a person who is no longer 
able to defend himself. But even here one remembers 
that calumny against a living person may not merely 
damage his reputation but ruin his life, so that if 
you are to be maligned there is (in the words of the 
poet) 

A good deal to be said 
For being dead. 

12 



THE NEW STYLE OF MEMOIR 

The thoughtless persons who quote De mortuis do 
not seem to reaUse that if their precious maxim were 
Hterally acted upon all history, and all biography, 
would be aboHshed at one swoop. No man could 
really be expected to hoax himself into thinking it 
amusing, or serviceable, to write history on these 
lines : 

So Henry VIII died, as he had lived, in the 
odour of sanctity, beloved by his wife (Catherine 
of Aragon) who was his first and only romance, 
and revered by his people. His spare features and 
sympathetic deep-sunken eyes, so vividly pre- 
served for us on the canvases of Holbein, attest 
the unworldly character of the man and the aus- 
terity of his life. No unfortunate incident marred 
the perfect serenity of his reign, save one only, 
the execution of Sir T. More, owing to a mis- 
understanding on the part of an official who never 
recovered from his remorse, though no blame 
could possibly attach to him. The King was out 
of town and heard nothing until too late. He wore 
mourning for the rest of his life. . . . 

If there was one thing Charles II detested more 
than marital infidelity, it was easy cynicism but 
no — all his contemporaries are dead, so there 
cannot possibly have been any infidelity or cyni- 
cism for him to detest], and the industry with 
which he served the commonwealth has never 
been surpassed by an EngUsh monarch, though 
every EngUsh monarch has equalled it. One of 
his noble actions was his refusal, when short of 
cash, owing to his large benefactions, of a gift of 

13 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

money from Louis XIV on the ground that it 
might appear to put him under an improper 
obligation. That, of course, was far from being 
in the mind of the French King, and it is difficult 
to say upon which Sovereign the incident reflects 
most credit. . . . 

Napoleon, Emperor of the French, a man dis- 
tinguished for the sacredness which he attached 
to human life and the implicit trust he put in 
human nature, died at St. Helena in 1821. He 
had abdicated in 181 5 owing to failing health, 
and chose that sunny island on the advice of his 
doctors, finding a great solace during his last 
years in the congenial conversation of an English- 
man, Sir Hudson Lowe, who exiled himself in 
order to be near his invalid friend. His name, as 
a benefactor of mankind, stands in the company 
of those of Elizabeth Fry, Frederick the Great, 
St. Francis of Assisi, Lord Rockingham, and 
Nero. . . . 

An interesting figure of the time was Charles 
Peace, a quaint and lovable Yorkshireman, with 
a great love of adventure, and a delightful talent 
as a violinist. He was born in Yorkshire, but lived 
latterly in South London, though he died away 
from home. 

That is the reductio ad ahsurdum of that over-driven 
and foolish proverb. We want about the dead the 
truth, and if our age has no Pepys, no Horace Wal- 
pole, no Charles Greville, posterity will be deprived 
of both the edification and the amusement to which 
it is entitled. Let people record as much as they can 

14 



THE NEW STYLE OF MEMOIR 

of those who are likely to be interesting to our 
descendants. But let them keep it for our descend- 
ants : or at least let them give their records time to 
get too stale to embarrass the persons they are 
writing about. 

I don't suppose, that is to say, that Lord Morley 
would much care if anybody now published his 
dinner-table, or more intimate, conversation at the 
time of the First Home Rule Bill, although he is 
still alive. But if people are to repeat private con- 
versations they had last year — there may be ex- 
ceptional occasions when urgent considerations of 
public interest make such a thing, after solemn 
reflection, seem right — private life becomes im- 
possible. It is only a stage from printing reports of 
private discussions three or four years ago to treat- 
ing private conversations as news. Unless some 
action is taken against gross off"enders, it will not be 
long before some more reckless and enterprising 
successor of Colonel Repington's goes to a dinner 
one night and has in the papers next morning a 
description of what everybody present said and did. 
You cannot elaborately swear everybody present to 
secrecy before you sit down ; yet you never know 
who is going on the loose as a diarist next. Yet how 
can one keep a rein upon one's tongue, or how would 
anything ever get done if everybody were mute as a 
fish on every subject except the weather ? Civilisation 
is only held together by an honourable respect for 
private life, by pledges unspoken, but neverthe- 
less implicit. There are thousands of people in 
London who, if they cared to print their recent 
recollections or their diaries, could make sensations 

15 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

and large sums of money. Even my ears, which have 
not Ustened to the whisperings of the Great with a 
hundredth part of Colonel Repington's assiduity, 
have received impressions which, if I were to trans- 
mit them to paper, would be quoted in every news- 
paper, titillate a large public, cause distress in 
many homes, and give trouble to a fair number of 
important people. Are we coming to a time when I 
shall be considered rather a brisk fellow if I sud- 
denly launch them all upon a printer ? 

It isn't only that things may be divulged which 
will cause serious trouble, though in recent diaries 
there have been these, but that people object to 
having their private lives and characters, however 
flatteringly, discussed in print at all. It is irritating 
to find one's friends saying in print that one is fond 
of one's children or that one gave a luncheon at 
which the food was very good. People don't Hke it. 
It isn't vanity, nor is it modesty, that makes them 
shrink from the modern sort of publicity : it is 
merely the common human desire for a measure of 
privacy and the common human feeling that there 
is an honourable obligation to respect that privacy 
if you are admitted into it. All else apart, even when 
harmless truths are told, they are often so told as to 
give false impressions. For myself I am not suflli- 
ciently, I am happy to say, of public interest to make 
it worth anybody's while to publish the fact that 
he came to lunch at my house on Sunday, that So- 
and-So and So-and-So were there, and that we said 
this and that about the French, Mr. Wells, the 
Russians, and President Wilson. But if anybody 
were to do that he would get a pretty hot reception 

i6 



THE NEW STYLE OF MEMOIR 

next time he attempted to speak to me. And I cannot 
understand how those who have been molested can 
behave otherwise to persons who have thus annoyed 
them. 



n 



PRONUNCIATION 

THE conversationalist in this country has a 
thorny road to tread. A correspondent writes , 
poor thing, to ask me, in confidence, how 
he should pronounce " Quixote," a word he finds 
frequently cropping up in his talk. His natural in- 
clination and early practice was to speak of Don 
Quixote as though the cavaUer had an English " x " 
in his name. Of late years he has found, when in 
circles where people really do know things, a growing 
tendency to pronounce the name in the Spanish 
way — which we may represent, though inadequately, 
by the spelling Keehotte. Now, my correspondent, 
being a sailor, is a shy and sensitive man. He feels 
sheepish. He does not want to drop " Don Quixote " 
out of his life altogether, as it is one of his favourite 
books, and he even has theories about it. But he is 
afraid. If he says " Quix " in the coarse English 
manner he fears that the experienced and super- 
cilious landsman may stare at him as at an illiterate 
boor ; but he shrinks from tackling the other pro- 
nunciation, partly because he knows he couldn't 
do it without looking self-conscious, partly because 
he does not wish to aftect an acquaintance with 
Spanish which he does not possess, and partly be- 
cause he is sure he would never get it right. He might 
even be so far from right that somebody, not under- 
standing or pretending not to understand, might 
make him repeat the outlandish syllables, a process 
which would cause him to blush all down his back. 
What, he asks, should he do ? 

i8 



PRONUNCIATION 

Say " Quix " and make no bones about it. It is 
an easier instance than most of its kind. " Quixote " 
has had an English pronunciation for years, a pro- 
nunciation as estabUshed as our pronunciation of 
" Paris," which no Englishman talking to another 
Englishman would dream of calling Paree. Not only 
this, but it has generated an EngUsh adjective, I 
doubt if the most pedantic or the most priggish of 
men says " Keehottic " for " Quixotic " ; yet it is 
grotesque to pronounce the one word in the English 
way whilst perspiring to restore an aUen pronunci- 
ation to the other. But the case would be quite 
strong enough without that. There is no point what- 
ever in forcing a foreign pronunciation (unless we 
are talking to foreigners) of some names unless we 
do the same for all. To go no further from Don 
Quixote than its author, there is Cervantes. He was 
a great man, and there are many interesting things 
about him. We know that — 

The Spaniards think Cervantes 
Worth half-a-dozen Dantes, 
An opinion resented bitterly 
By the people of Italy. 

He wrote one of the narrative masterpieces of the 
world, and thought it much inferior to his other 
works, which nobody can now read. But the point 
about him in our present connection is that his " C " 
is not pronounced by the Spaniards as an English 
" C," but rather (I hope I am correct — I do not 
know any Spanish) as a " th " ; and when the 
Spaniards don't sound " c " as " th " they sound it 

19 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

as " k." Yet the prig has still to begin operations who 
will call him (otherwise than because of some de- 
fect of utterance) Thervantes at an English dinner- 
table. Some words have always had a specially 
English pronunciation ; some (like Calais which 
Englishmen used to pronounce Callis) have had one 
and lost it. We can never be thoroughly systematic 
about it, but the man is a fool who arbitrarily selects 
some foreign v^ord which we have incorporated and 
attempts to denaturalise it again. 

" Don Quixote " is not the only name now being 
contested. The generation has not yet arisen which 
will suddenly begin calling Munich Munchen, but 
the Trafalgar affectation has been in full swing for 
some years. In Nelson's day and long afterwards all 
Englishmen said " Trafalgar." 

'Twas in Trafalgar's Bay, 
the song ran, not — 

'Twas in the Bay of Trafalgar. 

Then somebody discovered — what was no doubt 
known to many of Nelson's seamen, not to mention 
Drake's and, for all I know, Hanno's — that the 
Spaniards accented the last syllable. Such a piece 
of knowledge was too precious not to be paraded, 
and there is now a double pronunciation. The 
" masses " still stick to the English pronunciation ; 
the educated are almost evenly divided, though most 
of them, perhaps say Trafalgar when they re- 
member to. There is only one thing to be said in 
favour of Trafalgar. Trafalgar will not rhyme ; the 

20 



PRONUNCIATION 

battle is constantly being written about ; and Tra- 
falgdr will rhyme very nicely with words like star, 
avatar, nenuphar, bar, ^and cigar. But here again it 
is easy to point out the absurdity of the priggish 
pronunciation. The twin of Trafalgar is Waterloo. 
No foreigner pronounces that word as we do. The 
local pronunciation is Vaterlo ; and when a French- 
man recites Victor Hugo's stirring stanzas about it 
he says : 

Vaterlo, Vaterlo, Vaterlo, morne plaine. 

Now, it is plainly preposterous to make a great effort 
to pronounce Trafalgar like an Andalusian whilst 
ignoring the French and Belgian pronunciation of 
Waterloo. Possibly " Vaterlo " will be the next 
affectation ; and then we shall be asked to drop 
" Rome " for " Roma." 

In all these matters of pronouncing foreign names 
the maxim, not always applicable elsewhere, clearly 
applies, " what was good enough for our fathers is 
good enough for us." Since we cannot be logical 
and pronounce all foreign words as foreigners do, 
we might at least avoid futile pedantry and wanton 
changes. The people who are always trying to im- 
pose these tasks on our clumsy English tongues are 
always either men who are proud of possessing un- 
important knowledge which others do not possess, 
or still baser men who wish to be thought the pos- 
sessors of such knowledge. They do not confine 
their ravages to our traditional pronunciations ; 
they are equally fond of tinkering with spelling. It 
doesn't much matter how we spell the name of a 
foreign town or country so long as we all spell it 

21 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

alike. But once we have found a spelling comfort- 
able it is maddening to have to alter it merely be- 
cause some vainglorious fellow has seen a foreign 
map. When we were younger all Englishmen spelt 
" Corea " ; that has gone, and " Korea " has taken 
its place. The change would have been reasonable 
had the House of Commons, the British Academy, 
the Large Black Pig Society, or some other body 
which we might entrust with the control of our 
orthography, decided that all our hard English c's 
should be turned into k's. But we just pounce on 
this one unhappy word, whilst never thinking of 
bringing Kochin China, the Kaliph, Kolombo, 
Kalkutta, or the Kape of Good Hope into line with 
it. It is no good saying that the Koreans and the 
Chinese use a k and not a hard c ; for they use 
neither, preferring some sign which looks like a 
fragment of a bird-cage. Some one prig was origin- 
ally responsible for that alteration, and he had a 
numerous progeny during the late war. There was 
the man who suddenly began — and half of the others 
espied him within a month — calling the Sea of 
Marmora the Sea of Marmara, having seen that 
spelling in a French paper, or perhaps in a footnote 
of Sir Richard Burton's. He was a kindred spirit of 
the other pioneer who dropped the " o " out of 
what, until the war, was always spelt " Roumania." 
Every year now we shall find the attentions of these 
laborious scholars devoted to some new work. Pos- 
sibly Morocco (our spelling cannot conceivably 
represent the Moorish speUing) will begin appear- 
ing in leading articles as " Marrakha," or " Mar- 
rakka," or " Marakh," or some such thing. Or the 

22 



PRONUNCIATION 

gross Englishdom of " The Hague " will revolt the 
fastidious taste of some journalist who has done a 
week's walking tour in Holland, and we shall be 
treated to Den Haag or 'S Gravenshage or what- 
ever it is. Or the Bay of Napoli will start creeping 
in, or the Shah of Persia will become the Tchah of 
Perzhia, or Bokhara will become Bukhara, or Teheran 
will become Tihran. We cannot prevent these point- 
less alterations ; needs must be that follies should 
come, though woe unto him through whom they 
come. But as individuals those of us who desire to 
avoid affectation and prefer, as a general rule, to let 
well alone should make a point of conforming to 
existing usage in spelling, and in pronunciation, of 
employing those sounds which are more comfort- 
able to our tongues and more conformable to the 
English language and traditions. Next time my 
correspondent refers to Cervantes he should say 
Quixote with a " q " and with an " x," and say it 
both loud and clear. If anybody looks at him he 
should then repeat it without shamefacedness. And, 
provided his nerves hold out, if someone should 
try the Spanish pronunciation on him after he him- 
self has used the other, let him pretend not to under- 
stand. Above all, let him never make a cowardly 
mumbling noise in the hope that it may be taken 
for either pronunciation of any word. 



23 



BY LEWIS CARROLL 

A MAN can never tell where he will find books 
for sale nor what he will find if he enters the 
shop. The greatest discovery I myself ever 
made was made in a grubby second-hand shop off 
the Marylebone Road, where a few dozen dilapidated 
volumes were sprinkled about among old military 
medals, cane chairs, Victorian photographs, and 
sooty toilet-ware. The other day I found myself 
with two hours to spare in a cathedral town. The 
rain suddenly began to come down in solid sheets. 
I hurried along until I came to a likely doorway and 
found myself in another, though a greatly superior 
shop, where the products of all the arts lived in 
harmonious disarray. The books numbered some 
hundreds, and I set myself to a systematic inspection. 
Had the weather been finer or I less equable, the 
inspection would not long have continued. I have 
said it was a cathedral town. One did not therefore, 
expect to find piles of the most modern literature, 
and, in fact, there was none save a few novels, such 
as the early books of Mr. Frankfort Moore, which 
had been at last superannuated by the ladies of the 
Close. And the old books were considerably more 
attractive outside than inside. Their worn jackets 
of calf or pig or vellum were noble ; but the collec- 
tion of dead sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth 
century pedantry they contained would have appalled 
Sir John Sandys himself. They were not even the 
works of the best known of dead theologians and 
editors : not one of their authors had been heard of 

24 



BY LEWIS CARROLL 

for generations. " Some of these must be rare," 
remarked the dealer optimistically. ** I don't doubt 
it," I replied. " In that case," said he, " if one could 
only find people who want these particular books, 
we should get good prices for them." His logic was 
irrefutable ; the fact he ignored was the very 
stubborn fact that not one being in the world ever 
could want these books. Nevertheless, I opened all 
the big ones on the open shelves, then all the little 
ones, and then, still hopeful, the lower rows in a 
closed cupboard. Nothing came to light. I do 
not hke to stay a long time in a shop and buy nothing. 
I, therefore, gloomily selected the Cambridge 
University Calendar for 1826 — which is somewhat 
out of date, for scarcely half of the present dons were 
on the books then — and a late copy of Somerville's 
" The Chase," and prepared to go. 

It was the hour of luncheon ; my hands were 
covered with dust and my overcoat sticky with cob- 
webs. I began searching my pockets for money. But 
there was one top shelf in the glazed cupboard which 
I had not yet reached. One never knows what one 
will come across, I reminded myself. Most of its 
contents were visible at a distance ; dull little rows of 
the British Essayists, " The World," '* The Micro- 
cosm," " The Traveller," or their analogues. But a 
few unlabelled books in the corner were worth taking 
down, and I took them down. One was " Reading 
Without Tears," which I certainly could not read 
without tears ; there were also pamphlets about grow- 
ing roses and resisting sin ; and there were volumes 
of verses by extinct spinsters and clergymen. Almost 
the last I reached was a small, flat-backed book in 

25 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

faded dark purple, with a sober blind-stamped 
pattern around the covers and the title, in large gilt 
letters — comma and all — " Index, to In Memoriam," 
I opened it : ** Rare, 2S. 6d.," was the inscription. 
It was at least rare enough for me never to have 
heard of it, though it was published by Moxon in 
1862, and carried at the end Moxon 's January, 1862, 
list. It would be an exaggeration to call it a read- 
able volume. It is not an entire concordance, but 
every phrase is indexed under the principal nouns 
and verbs it contains. A desire to economise type- 
setting led the authors to abbreviate the main words 
in their quotations. The result is forty pages in 
double columns filled with entries, oddly comic in 
their effect, like : 

I do but s because I must 

Grief as deep as / 

The common / of good 

Office of the social h 

Abuse the genial h 

To beat the g 

And said " The d, the d" 

More faith in honest d 

Din and steam of t 

The M of " / " and " me." 

I lingered over it, and then I looked at Moxon's list, 
a list which would do credit to any publisher. 
" Works by the Poet Laureate " headed it ; under- 
neath the table came — what do you think ? 

*^* The above works are always to be had in 
Morocco Bindings. 

26 



BY LEWIS CARROLL 

Even at this date we could have told Mr. Moxon 
that. He did not show, however, all the respect he 
might have shown to the Poet Laureate. There was 
a little room left on that first page of the catalogue, 
and he squeezed three more titles into it. One was 
Col. George Greenwood's " Hints on Horseman- 
ship to a Nephew and Niece," no doubt an excellent 
manual enunciating right principles and warning 
against dangerous errors ; but the others, cheek by 
jowl with the works of Tennyson, as though there 
were no difference between them, were " Athelstan, 
a Poem," and some Lays of the Better Land, by 
E. L. What were they and where are they now ? 

Haydn's " Dictionary of Dates " was in Moxon 's 
list ; so were the works of Lamb and Hood, the 
illustrated editions of Rogers, " works by the late 
William Wordsworth," and numbers of Coleridge's 
books, including the second edition of " Biographia 
Literaria." Mrs. Shelley's edition of Shelley comes 
on the same page as Goethe's " Faust," translated 
by " A. Hayward, Esq., Q.C." This was Abraham, 
the conversationalist of the Atheneeum Club : his 
prose translation was already in its seventh edition, 
but I fancy it is now as little known as that deplor- 
ably feeble volume of original verses which he 
allowed himself to publish. Hogg's " Life of Shelley" 
and Trelawny's " Recollections " head the last page 
with two other books, known still by name but 
scarcely otherwise : Milnes' Poems in three volumes, 
and Talfourd's dramatic works in one. Talfourd 
certainly had fame ; this was the eleventh edition 
of his collected plays. But he fades. Last year I saw 
the original complete manuscript of his masterpiece 

27 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

" Ion " offered by a Scottish bookseller for ^5. Five 
pounds : and I was not even tempted to buy it. 
" Rare, 2s. 6d.," . . . a concordance, which I 
can never conceivably use, to "In Memoriam " 
. . . Moxon's list of fifty years ago. ..." I think 
I will have this," I said. I turned back to the fly- 
leaf and examined an inscription I had casually 
noticed there. This is how it ran : 

To A. W. Dubourg with sincere regards from 
C. L. Dodgson, one of the compilers, Oct., 1873. 

I passed it to the merchant for confirmation of the 
price. He also glanced at the inscription, but he did 
not take it in, and as he had just been telling me, 
with every appearance of delight, of the rare first 
editions which he had bought for next to nothing 
from people who were unfit to look after them, I 
felt no scruple about refraining from explanation. 
C. L. Dodgson was Lewis Carroll ; it may be that 
his Index is as well known as his Alice ; I at least 
had never seen it before, and I conceive that few 
people know the book and fewer will know that he 
was " one of the compilers." I imagined that con- 
versation in 1873, eleven years after that labour of 
love had been completed. Mr. Dubourg was, I 
seem to have heard, a Parliamentary official of some 
sort. Perhaps they were intimate friends ; or per- 
haps they met occasionally at dinner parties, and 
one evening the dialogue, known to most authors in 
most ages, took place : 

Dubourg : I don't think he's ever done any- 
thing better than " In Memoriam." 

28 



BY LEWIS CARROLL 

DoDOSON : No ; I agree ; it is a beautiful 
thing ; I read it constantly. 
' DouBOURG : So do I ; but I wish it were easier 
to find one's way about it. Somebody ought to 
make an index to it, so that we could look up any 
particular phrase. 

DoDGSON {with a slightly wistful smile) : Oh, 
it's been done. As a matter of fact I did it myself 
eleven years ago ; at any rate, I and another man. 
But I'm not surprised you've not seen it. Nobody 
ever has. 

DuBOURG : Is it still to be got ? 

DoDGSON : I shouldn't think so. I should 
imagine it was remaindered or pulped years ago. 

DuBOURG : That is a nuisance. 

DoDGSON : As a matter of fact I've got about 
twenty copies at home. If you Hke I'll send you 
one when I get back. 

DuBOURG : Oh, thanks ever>so much. I should 
love to have one. Don't forget to write your name 
in it. 

But possibly it didn't happen like this. Possibly 
it was another Dubourg. Possibly — unpleasing 
thought — it was even another C. L. Dodgson. I 
shall look it up. 



29 



PRESS-CUTTINGS 

THERE are people who are perpetually curi- 
ous to know what others are saying about 
them behind their backs. Whenever we meet 
them it does not take long for the conversation to 
drift in the direction of their preoccupation. " Some- 
body," remarks the person of this type, " told me 
the other day — I can't quite believe it — that Jones 
told a party at Smith's house that I was addicted 
to cocaine. Can he have said it, do you think ? " You, 
liking everybody to be happy, and perhaps thinking 
Jones capable of saying almost anything when flown 
with insolence and wine, reply disingenuously that 
the report is ridiculous. " I'm sure," you say, " that 
he couldn't have said anything so absurd, except 
possibly as a joke." That doesn't get you out of it. 
" It didn't come to me as a joke. I wish you'd be 
honest with me. I'd much rather know precisely 
where I stand with people." If you have self-com- 
mand, you continue to produce evasions and lies 
until you can change the subject ; but too many 
people yield to temptation and proceed, under a 
catechism which they invite whilst pretending not 
to dislike it, to repeat all the backbitings they can 
remember. The questioner never really wants to 
hear that people have called him a fool or a bigamist, 
a bad artist or a sponger upon the public purse. 
Sometimes it is his vanity that makes him imagine 
perpetual conversations about himself and curious, 
at whatever cost, to get an inkling of them. Some- 
times it is his self-distrust that leads him to be 

30 



PRESS-CUTTINGS 

perpetually hunting for expressions of opinion that 
will buttress him up in his own esteem, the result of 
his searches usually being precisely the opposite. 
" What did he say about me ? . . . You might as well 
tell me. ... I can assure you I shan't mind." But 
usually they do mind. 

But what is all this ? you will ask. These 
moralisings may be true and even trite, but why 
do they appear here on a page supposed to have 
something to do with books and their authors ? 
Reader, what you have just perused is a first para- 
graph. The essential thing about the art of writing 
an essay is that you should not plunge at once into 
the subject you intend to discuss. Lead the reader 
gradually to it. That way you will give him a sur- 
prise, and produce also the illusion that he has shared 
in a wandering train of thought. All the best essay- 
ists do it ; many of them, I believe, do the beginnings 
of their essays last, and start them at as remote a 
point from the main theme as possible. Myself, I 
am forgetful, hasty, spontaneous, naturally candid 
and devoid of artifice. But I have remembered this 
time ; even yet I have not reached my subject ; I feel 
a certain, as I hope justifiable, pride in the achieve- 
ment ; and I trust I may be pardoned for calling 
the reader's attention to it. That first paragraph is 
by no means perfect ; for it had, as will be seen, a 
direct relation with my subject. The subject wasn't 
actually mentioned ; but a master of the mode would 
have begun with " Sir Walter Raleigh once said," or 
" When Layard was digging in the ruins of Nineveh," 
or " I was walking down Bishopsgate one day last 
week." Never mind ; so far as it goes it is all right. 

31 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

And now for the subject proper, which impalpably 
dawns at this stage hke the sun sHpping out of the 
barred, low clouds of morning twilight. I conceive 
of authors who too avidly study their press-cuttings 
as in the same unfortunate position as those too 
curious listeners. 

It all arose really out of a conversation with a man 
of genius, for whose character and art I have great 
respect. He told me that he was in the habit of read- 
ing his press-cuttings, and that sometimes they 
gave him acute pain and even kept him awake. 
People said such malicious things ; other people 
thoughtlessly said such unfair things. Why weren't 
people more amiable, more careful, more inclined 
to assume that they had no monopoly of decency, 
sense, and artistic ideals ? " Why on earth," I asked 
him, " do you subscribe to these things if they 
upset you ? " He couldn't exactly say. He had 
contracted the habit, and the habit had become a 
disease. He hoped he would have the resolution to 
break himself of it ; but he wasn't sure. Nor am I. 
I doubt if he will. 

I have met a good many authors who have had 
this experience. I know several who refrain from 
buying press-cuttings and even from searching the 
papers for reviews of their own books. Some of them 
know that they will either be bored or irritated by 
the great majority of the references to their works ; 
others are frankly indifferent. No sensible person, 
I take it, is totally incurious about criticism of him- 
self. Informed criticism is interesting, maybe useful, 
and, if favourable, warms the heart. But in point of 
fact I don't think that the author who refrains from 

32 



PRESS-CUTTINGS 

the systematic collection of press-cuttings is likely 
to miss much that should really interest him. He 
and his friends will be in the habit of seeing most of 
the journals in which serious criticism is likely to 
appear ; everything really complimentary is pretty 
certain to be brought to his notice ; he will be lucky 
if accident or the well-meant effort of misguided 
acquaintance stops short at that. Even if a criticism 
of any seriousness appears in a local paper in the 
Orkneys, somebody — very likely the author of it — 
will probably draw his attention to it. If not, no 
harm is done : the main purpose of current criti- 
cism being to keep the public informed, not to give 
authors a happy or unhappy five minutes at break- 
fast. Let persons who are easily wounded check 
their morbid curiosity and leave press-cuttings alone. 
Nine reviews out of ten are not worth reading. 

The one kind of man who should and will go on 
getting press-cuttings is the man who likes absurd- 
ities. I knew one signal example of this. I used to 
stay with him. Little pink bundles of cuttings 
arrived almost every morning. He would open them, 
unroll them, glance rapidly through them. The long 
commentaries from " serious " papers he would 
glance at, giving a grunt of satisfaction if they 
appeared to be good advertisements, but not reading 
them. He had his own opinion of his merits ; for 
the rest he was interested in the criticism of certain 
friends. But he would put aside anything grotesquely 
short and summary, any paragraphs from " gossip " 
columns, any reviews from very outlandish places, 
like Sligo or Kirkcaldy. These promised well, and 
he went through them closely. Every now and then 

33 D 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

he would laugh with great complacency and pass 
one across, for it contained something preposterous, 
some absurdly-worded laudation or quite extrava- 
gant abuse. And the pearls he would keep. The best 
out of many years' supply he had hung, mounted and 
framed, around his study. Over the desk were three 
portraits of other men with his own name falsely 
printed underneath them — mistakes made by news- 
papers. Dominant above the fireplace was a row of 
invectives : one provincial scribe had called him a 
pretentious ignoramus, and another a sinister cynic. 
He liked it. That is the kind of man for whom press- 
cuttings are worth while. The others, I think, would 
be far better off without them. It is not healthy for 
men to get into the way of hungering for notice and 
brooding over casual and ephemeral things said 
about them by Tom, Dick, or Harry. 



34 



ON KNOWING AUTHORS 

I MET a man who said he had met another 
man. " I ahvays thought," he said, " that he 
was one of the best people alive, but I found 
him disappointingly commonplace." I suggested, as 
unobtrusively as I could, that if the original con- 
ception was right the gentleman could not possibly 
be commonplace ; though it might be his natural 
habit or his whim to confine his conversation with 
strangers to commonplace topics. It wasn't the first 
time I've heard such a remark ; in fact, I have often 
heard would-be hero-worshippers say despondently 
that they are almost always disappointed in great 
men when they meet them. But what portents do 
they expect ? 

You stand with an artist drinking cocktails at the 
American bar in the Royal Automobile Club, or 
you sit next to him at a dinner in the Fishmongers' 
Hall, or you meet him at an evening party in a 
friend's house, or you are introduced to him in the 
street. Those are the sort of encounters you have 
with a man whom you do not know very well. You 
talk about other people, whether they are nice, 
nasty, clever, foolish, generous, spiteful, ill, well, 
prosperous, or in difficulties ; or you exchange 
notes about Mr. Lloyd George ; or you discuss 
American prohibition ; or you ask each other if you 
have read " War and Peace," Andre Gide, or the 
posthumous novels of Henry James. Your con- 
versation, in fact, is ordinary human conversation ; 
the poet or the romantic novelist or the metaphysician 

35 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

is as likely as anybody else to ask you what is going 
to win the Derby, why the Irish want separation, 
which is the best village in Cornwall for a family's 
summer holiday, or whether there is a chance that 
the medical profession will some day discover some- 
thing about influenza. He will, assuming he does 
not live behind an impenetrable wall of silence, be 
at worst an ordinary talker and at best a brilliant 
one. But in the general way he will not be uncom- 
monly profound or passionate or tender. This often 
leads people to say that they are disappointed in 
artists ; the men do not come up to their works. 
A little reflection will demonstrate that it is im- 
possible that artists should lack qualities which are 
really present in their works, 

I mean qualities of thought and feehng. A man 
may have the gift of literary and not the gift of vocal 
expression. Goldsmith " wrote like an angel and 
talked like poor Poll," The extreme instance would 
be a dumb man, who might nevertheless be the 
most eloquent of essayists. Some men talk as well 
as they write ; some better than they write ; some 
as they write ; and some diff"erently. But nothing 
can come out of a man except what is there, and if 
you fuid a sympathetic heart in a man's writing 
which he does not show over the cocktails, it merely 
means that over the cocktails he is too reserved, 
proud, shy, preoccupied, or merely interested to 
show it. Keats, at the Burford Bridge Hotel, would 
not have talked to stray acquaintances in the strain 
of " Lone star, would I were stedfast as thou art " ; 
even with his friends, or with Fanny Brawne in per- 
son, he would not be doing that all the time. Elderly 

36 



ON KNOWING AUTHORS 

memoirists stillinsist on describing Browning as " a 
red-faced diner out," and exclaiming at an apparent 
incompatibility between his conviviality and his 
poetry. This is mere lack of imagination. What 
you clearly have to do is to reconcile the two, to 
realise that men are many-sided, and that Browning 
Avas merely an unusually striking demonstration of 
the fact that men do not commonly show their 
deeper sides in public. The rubicund old gentleman 
who took Lady Edith down to dinner was not 
entirely absorbed in eating and gossiping ; he did 
not secrete poems imconsciously in his sleep. That 
morning he had been wrestling in prayer or harassed 
by the evil in the world ; even at moments amid 
the silk and silver and glass of the dinner-party 
there were intervals when, whilst his lips were 
bantering or chatting about Lord Granville or the 
Russians or the Royal Academy, he saw eternity 
through his surroundings, all the gaiety and the 
grandeur fading like a flower, or throbbed at the 
beauty of a remembered sea or ached with an old 
remembered grief. 

And so your artist, if he really has something in 
him, when you meet him in the street, or at — it is 
]:)ossible — a croquet competition, or on the Dover- 
Ostend boat, or at a committee meeting of the 
Authors' Society. Do you expect him suddenly to 
buttonhole you and ask you if you are saved ? Do 
you expect him to go on his knees and pray, insist 
on calling your attention to the tints of his liqueurs, 
rhapsodise over lights and shadows, and confide in 
you the dreams of his first love, or of how he sweated 
last night when he faced the imminence of Death ? 

37 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

Certainly not. Yet it is of such things that art is 
made ; it is emotions and reflections of this nature 
which we ordinarily find in the art, and suppose, 
casually meeting him, not to exist in the artist who 
has put them there. Shakespeare, as we know, was 
obliged to spend part of his time signing deeds, 
arranging mortgages, and suing people for debt ; 
one can hear his contemporaries saying to each 
other, " How that fellow can have written ' To- 
morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow ' beats 
me." The fact is that he wrote it, and that what in 
him it sprang from was present when he was in the 
Law Courts and present when he was at the Mer- 
maid, being rebuked (sufflaminandus erat) by mutton- 
fisted Ben for excessively voluble high spirits. 

The fact is that the mere routine of living takes 
most of our time, and that few men five with their 
hearts perpetually on their sleeves. An artist has at 
least his art for communication ; outside that he is 
only like the generality of mankind if he seldom shows 
his best and deepest sides. Even a sensitive man's 
most intimate friends will seldom get into so close 
a contact with him as one establishes at once if one 
reads a good book. There are moments when by 
imperceptible gradations two people — rarely more 
than two together — fall into confidences and unlock 
the secret thoughts, visions, and hankerings of years. 
We have all known such moments and we treasure 
the memory of them. It is, perhaps, as well that we 
do not systematically seek them ; anyhow, to the 
person of imagination they are not very necessary. 
Artist or not, there is always a man behind the mask. 
About the artist we have more information. That is 

38 



ON KNOWING AUTHORS 

why " character sketches " of business men or 
politicians are nearly always interesting, whereas 
" character sketches " of artists tell us nothing that 
we did not know already — tell us much less, in fact. 
For the artist himself has already told us everything 
that he has to say. 



39 



A RETURN 

I HAVE been to America, my friendship to which 
country is now established on an even more solid, 
and liquid, basis than before. Going, I imagined 
that I should post a weekly essay from there ; if I 
may say so, without irreverence to that continent, 
my road to America was paved with good intentions ; 
but the moment I got into the Hudson and saw a 
grey silent mass in the distance of dawn, the con- 
gregation of high buildings on Manhattan, I knew 
I was doomed. There would, at any moment of the 
day or night, always be something more interesting 
to see than my own handwriting. But that may look 
as though I made a deliberate choice in the matter ; 
the truth being that I was a straw in the wind, and 
should have fulfilled, with the excitement of that 
country around me, no previously contracted 
obligations, hovk^ever sacred, however lucrative even. 
My will abdicated and conscience went to sleep. 

I may at least plead this, not as an excuse, but as 
something on the credit side : that I am not going 
to write a book about America. This is very un- 
usual. So unusual that I found it to be incredible. 
Many Americans refused to believe me when I told 
them so ; after all I had been in the country six 
weeks. Oh, yes, I could write the book. I can see it 
all, on the model consecrated by generations of 
travelling men of letters. There would be the chapter 
on the voyage, the good ship " Dipsomania " leaving 
Liverpool, the strange faces of the foreign immi- 
grants going to Eldorado, the community hfe in 

40 



A RETURN 

mid-Atlantic, the preliminary conversation with 
the shrewd and quiet American on the ship, con- 
scious of all his country's problems, conversant with 
everything that had been said about them, opening 
out to a really sympathetic foreigner ; the Overture 
to the orchestral discussion which would come later, 
accustoming the reader's ears to all the principal 
motifs. Then, after this, would come the approach, 
the new chapter beginning " We entered the Hudson 
in the grey of morning," and containing remarks 
about the magnificence of New York harbour, the 
disappointing unimpressiveness of the Statue of 
Liberty, and the magnificence of the great group 
of Down Town skyscrapers, " Especially at night, 
when ..." 

The rest is all cut and dried. I could do that 
chapter on New York, with remarks on the latest 
architecture, the management of the traffic, the 
luxury of the shops, the frequency of Jews and 
Italians, the character of the theatres, the jolly 
splendours of the Great White Way, the strange fate 
of little old Trinity Church among the giant office 
buildings, the unpicturesque convenience of num- 
bered streets, the glories of the Metropolitan Museum 
and certain private collections over which I was 
courteously shown by Mr. X and Mr. Y, and the 
traffic over Brooklyn Bridge, mingled with reflec- 
tions on the existence, nature, and purpose of 
American hustling, the differences between New 
York and London papers, the extent to which 
American men and women are or are not better or 
more fashionably dressed than the inhabitants of 
London, and the question as to how much sleep the 

41 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

average New Yorker gets. Similar chapters or half- 
chapters would be devoted to Philadelphia, Wash- 
ington, Chicago, and Boston. The formulae are all 
ready. 

Philadelphia, although a city of two millions, 
still retains something of the dignity and gravity 
of an old Quaker town. Many of the streets have 
a distinct Colonial quality, and the big buildings 
are neither very numerous nor very tall. . . . 

Washington is said by those who know it to be 
the pleasantest place in the world to live in. Digni- 
fied, reposeful, umbrageous, blessed with fine air 
and beautiful natural surroundings and possess- 
ing a permanent population which . . . 

Chicago, to the man who has formed his ideas 
from " The Jungle," has a good many pleasant 
surprises. The stockyards do exist, and so do the 
slums and the immigrants. But the parks are . . . 
the principal shopping streets are . . . and above 
all the magnificent drive along the Lake Shore is 
. . . whilst the generosity of millionaire bene- 
factors has . . . and the vast buildings of the new 
University are . . . 

Boston, to some extent, keeps its character . . . 
Lowells . . . Lodges . . . Henry James . . . 
Harvard . . . But in our own time it has greatly 
expanded and it is now largely an Irish city . . . 
What Boston thinks of the rest of America . . . 
what the rest of America thinks of Boston. . . . 

Memory, and a Baedeker, would soon, I think, make 
five thousand words apiece out of these. And then 

42 



A RETURN 

we should pass on : "I did not visit the West, 
but . . ." 

How Conservative is the South ! What a riddle is 
the Middle West ! How remote is California and 
how peculiar her conditions ! In Charlestown they 
still remember General Lee and the injustices of 
Mr. Lincoln. In Cincinnati they are mainly Ger- 
mans. That is all very straightforward, but we 
should be compelled at last, after our general im- 
pressionistic survey giving a rough idea of the vast 
variety of climates and social conditions, to come 
to certain specific subjects of debate. Without 
immodesty, I think I could do that chapter on the 
New Immigration. I should get— as lazy authors 
do not always get — some statistics ; but I should 
be quite on the approved lines in my remarks on 
the dangers of an unchecked flow, on the clash of 
cultures ; on the respective degrees to which various 
kinds of foreigners can be absorbed ; on the domin- 
ance of the Anglo-Saxon ; on the effect of the war 
and recent legislation upon the inflow from Central 
and Southern Europe, and on the systematic efforts 
at " Americanisation." Then the Colour Problem, 
the qualities of the negro, the impossibility of mis- 
cegenation, lynchings, Booker Washington and Du 
Bois, negro schools, Jim Crow cars, the Southern 
Darkie, the need for careful consideration of a 
question which has no apparent solution. Then the 
Economic Structure, wholesale agriculture and 
meat-raising, centralisation, specialisation, mass- 
production, trustification. Then Politics : Why 
respectable people seldom go into them, stories 
about graft, the spoils system, the police, city 

43 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

government and Tammany Hall — with some hope- 
ful signs and the City Managers' plan. Then 
Education : Hundreds of Universities and hundreds 
of thousands of undergraduates ; the attempt to 
make an Educated Democracy — this is only a Be- 
ginning, at present the exceptional Individual is 
hardly catered for ; the need of an Honours System; 
Athletics, new buildings, the Harkness Quadrangle, 
libraries, benefactors. Then the Millionaires : Their 
endowments, their collections, their way of life, 
their power, the public attitude towards them, the 
various sorts of them. But why proceed ? Look at 
the chapter headings of twenty books about America, 
rapidly written by the rapidly peregrinating, and 
you will have a good idea of this unwritten book of 
mine. It would surely be so easy. xAind they might, 
if I were vivacious and fortunate, run it as a serial 
in the pages of a magazine. 

Yet, if I had written that book, I think there might 
have been a few pages in it that would not have 
appeared in most of the others. I remember certain 
landscapes and certain small towns which I am not 
likely ever to forget — New England bound with 
ice ; Frankfort in its wooded gorge ; Charlottes- 
ville in Virginia, with the lovely Georgian quad- 
rangle in a high valley among tree-covered conical 
hills, with the Blue Ridge Mountains in the dis- 
tance ; Annapolis, with the grey Navy buildings 
reflected in the lagoon and behind theiii a perfect 
eighteenth-century town, quiet in the sunshine, 
streets of old brick houses radiating from the knoll 
on which stands the Augustan State House. The new 
things cannot be ignored, nor the multitudes ; 

44 



A RETURN 

problems we have and problems we must discuss ; 
but I cannot help wishing that some time or another 
an English traveller with leisure and sensibilities 
and a style should think it worth while to go through 
the East, or the South, or the West, or even the 
middle of the United States, as so many have gone 
through Sussex, France, the Rhineland, Italy, Spain, 
India, and Japan — looking for the beautiful, the 
amusing, the curious, the humane in landscapes 
and people, thinking of the individual and of the 
past more than of the crowd and the future, leaving 
sociology and anxiety to others. 



45 



THE KING OF PRUSSIA 

I OPENED a book casually and began reading an 
essay on Frederic the Great of Prussia, once 
known to these islands as " The Protestant 
Hero," given a new vogue by Carlyle, but at present 
somewhat under a cloud owing to the perpetuation 
of the worst of his proclivities in his descendants. 
Suddenly I came upon a passage about his literary 
compositions ; certain of them were commended, 
but not his poems. " Nobody," ran the curt sentence, 
" can now read his verses." 

How rash such statements are ! It would hardly 
be safe to assert that nobody can now read Rollin, 
Sir Richard Blackmore, or the encyclopaedia of 
Vincent of Beauvais. " Very few can read ..." 
"it is not easy to conceive that anybody can read 
. . . ," " the man must have plenty of time to waste 
who reads . . . ," "he must be an eccentric fool 
who reads . . ." : all these openings would be 
quite safe in reference to hosts of old books. But the 
man who confidently writes " nobody can now 
read " does so at his risk. As I saw those dogmatic 
words my soul uprose in pride. " I can," it said, 
" and, what's more, I have." The answer was accurate 
and complete. I once read Frederic's poems, I found 
a mild pleasure in reading them, and I have now, 
under this adventitious incentive, been looking at 
them again. 

I don't mean to say that I hunted for them, or 
that I wasn't happy until I got them. I could have 
lived my life quite at my ease without ever catching 

46 



THE KING OF PRUSSIA 

a glimpse of them. It was pure accident that brought 
into my hands a copy of Frederic's poems, and I 
should probably never have looked at them had I 
not possessed a copy of my own. I picked it up in the 
sixpenny box of a bookseller who did not know them 
for what they were, as there is no author's name on 
the title-page. The book is rather remarkable. The 
title is " Poesies Di verses," and the edition was 
published in Berlin in 1760 by Christian Frederic 
Voss. The royal author, or his publisher, spared no 
expense. The volume is a handsome quarto, gilt 
edged ; the paper is good and the print handsome ; 
and the pages are embellished with decorations on 
the best French models of the time. It w^as the great 
age of copper-plate pictures, and the German 
artists, Meil and Schmidt, did their Teutonic 
best to follow in the footsteps of the French masters. 
The frontispiece is a full-page engraving of a nude 
and bearded person with vast thews, sitting on a 
rock at a cave's entrance, and contemplatively play- 
ing a seven-stringed lyre. There are tailpieces full 
of musical instruments, goddesses, cupids, clouds, 
clarions, and Dresden shepherds and shepherdesses 
languorously reclining amid sylvan bowers, and 
there are really charming initials ever)rwhere. But 
where the artist — in this instance, Schmidt — really 
laid himself out (no doubt, under instruction) was 
in the big series of engravings illustrating L'Art de 
la Guerre. The armoured prince is shown in every 
stage of operation. He is crowned with laurel, he is 
girded by Bellona, he directs an attack on a town 
amid a hail of large cannon-balls, he examines a 
map, he surveys his hosts from a hill, he leads them 

47 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

into a city, and he reclines on a sofa with his spouse, 
whilst his young prattlers pull off his boots. And 
this, on the whole, is Frederic's most interesting 
poem. 

He wrote twenty epistles and a number of odes, 
including some addressed to Gresset, Maupertius, 
and Voltaire, whom he addresses as 

Fils d'Apollon, Homere de la France. 

They all have a certain flavour of personality about 
them, but it is in the art of war that one naturally 
finds most piquancy, and it is the most ambitious 
of Frederic's efforts. It is in six cantos ; a sort of 
solemn, extended monologue, full of scraps of 
history, sketches of operations, and elevated senti- 
ments. A certain amount is talked about glory. It 
comes into the peroration, and it comes at the be- 
ginning, where the " young Prince " is exhorted : 

ecoutez les legons d'un soldat. 
Qui forme dans les camps, nourri dans les allarmes, 
Vous appelle a la Gloire, et vous instruit aux amies. 

But Frederic is not to be taken as a militarist. He 
has seen too much of " ces ravages sanglans," and 
he urges the General to control his soldiers, and calls 
maledictions on the cruel commander who plunders 
and ravages and permits wanton carnage. No : 

Je ne vous offre point Attila pour module ; 
Je veux un Heros juste, un Tite, un Marc Aurele . . , 
Tombent tous les lauriers du front de la Victoire, 
Plutot que 1 'injustice en ternisse la gloire. 

48 



THE KING OF PRUSSIA 

It is extraordinary how Attila seems to haunt the 
Hohenzollern imagination. 

Frederic's poems are certainly prosaic as a rule. 
But they are not alone in their dullness in that 
century, and they are less dull than some ; I don't 
find Armstrong's " Art of Preserving Health," once 
so celebrated, as Hvely. Frederic wrote the unin- 
spired, argumentative discourses and the formal 
apostrophes common in his time both in France 
and England. His collected works in verse and prose 
fill many volumes ; the prose is said to be good, 
and the reasoning sometimes acute. Whatever the 
hterary value of his work, I imagine that he was the 
most prolific writer who has ever sat on a European 
throne. " A long time ago the world began " ; Marcus 
Aurelius was a great writer, and I dare say the com- 
positions of King Alfred were very remarkable for 
their period. But royal poets since then have been 
more numerous than fertile ; and we may fairly say 
that, with the exception of James I of Scotland, v/ho 
wrote the " King's Quair," no modern sovereign 
has taken the job of writing verse more seriously. In 
fact, to the best of my remembrance — though I am 
rather hazy about all the Stanislases and Wenceslases 
of the old Polish and Bohemian realms — there is no 
near rival to him. 

Certainly our own English monarchs do not com- 
pete. A few verses apiece are ascribed to many of 
them. Coeur de Lion is reputed to have written a 
Provencal song lamenting that he had spent two 
winters unransomed in prison ; possibly he got 
Blonde! to write it for him. To Edward II is ascribed 
a Latin poem complaining of his lot, and to Henry VI 

49 E 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

an English one on the theme, " Kingdoms are 
but cares," and there are some grounds for ascribing 
to Henry VIII a group of lyrics. The best is 
" Pastime with Good Company." There is also one 
beginning : 

As the holly groweth green. 

And never changeth hue, 
So am I, and ever have been, 

Unto my lady true. 

I can only say that if he really wrote that and read 
it to his courtiers, they must have found it rather 
difficult to control their faces. Edward VI is credited 
with a longish poem arguing about the Eucharist, 
and his sister Elizabeth with several vigorous lyrics, 
including one about Mary Queen of Scots, " the 
daughter of debate that discord aye doth sow." Of 
James VI and I, the British Solomon, there is no 
doubt. He published two volumes of verse, one of 
which (1584) was called " The Essays of a Prentise," 
and his collected works in verse and prose were 
published in 161 6. If only his sonnets were as racy 
as his " Counterblast to Tobacco," they would be 
worth having. Charles II, if he really wrote " I Pass 
All My Hours," which has been imputed to him, 
would have employed himself well in writing more. 
With the Stuarts our literary monarchs apparently 
ended ; the poems of George HI and William IV, 
if they wrote any, have never seen the light. 



SO 



JOHN POMFRET 

NOBODY knows everything or remembers 
everything he has known. If you talk long 
enough to the most learned of literary men 
you will find — in the end — some quite unexpected 
gap in his erudition. But I must say that I was more 
than ordinarily surprised to find Mr. Maurice 
Hewlett saying that he hadn't heard of Pomfret. 
Mr. Hewlett is writing on James Lackington, the 
celebrated cheap bookseller of a century ago. Pomfret 
one would have supposed to be far more widely 
known than Lackington ; he gets space of a sort in 
all the Hterary histories, whereas Lackington 's 
delicious Memoirs are the private pastime of a few 
explorers like Mr. Hewlett, who knows English and 
French memoir-literature inside-out. Mr. Hewlett's 
precise words are : 

" Pomfret's Poems " inspire Uttle enthusiasm 
in me who, I am sorry to say, know nothing of 
them or their Pomfret. 

Well, time was when Pomfret's " Choice " was 
known to every Englishman who read verse. 

John Pomfret, son of the Vicar of Luton, was 
born in 1667 and educated at Queens' College, 
Cambridge. In 1695 he became Vicar of Maulden, 
in Bedfordshire, and in 1702 transferred to Mill- 
brook. He married in 1692. In 1703 he died, and 
his death is supposed to have been hastened by a 
very unfortunate contretemps. At the end of his 
celebrated poem he wrote : 

51 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

Would bounteous Heaven once more indulge, I'd 

choose 
(For who would so much satisfaction lose 
As witty nymphs in conversation give) 
Near some obliging modest fair to live. 

To this fair creature I'd sometimes retire, 
Her conversation would new joys inspire. 

And as I near approach the verge of life, 
Some kind relation (for I'd have no wife) 
Should take upon him all my worldly care, 
While I did for a better world prepare. 

When Pomfret (who had been married for years) 
applied to Dr. Compton, Bishop of London, for 
institution to a fat living (he already had two) to 
which he had been presented, enemies or fools 
represented to the Bishop that this passage was 
immoral. It implied, they said, that Pomfret thought 
concubinage preferable to marriage. The Bishop, a 
weak man, listened to this slander. Pomfret hastened 
to London to dispel it. In London he caught small- 
pox, and he died from it. 

Pomfret 's poems appeared in 1699. " The Choice" 
at once overshadowed all its companions. The 
" Poems " as a collection had reached their tenth 
edition in 1736, but " The Choice " was continually 
reprinted by itself, in anthologies and otherwise. 
Four quarto editions of it appeared in the single 
year 1701. Dr. Johnson said " Perhaps no com- 
position in our language has been oftener pursued 

52 



JOHN POMFRET 

than Pomfret's ' Choice.' " In 1807 (Pomfret still, 
and for years after that, was being reprinted) 
Southey asked " Why is Pomfret the most popular 
of the English poets ? The fact is certain, and the 
solution would be useful." Campbell, eleven years 
after, according to Birkbeck Hill, " thus criticised 
this statement : It might have been demanded with 
equal propriety, why London Bridge is built of 
Parian marble." But some years had passed ; the 
romantic age had begun ; and the evidence of 
Johnson, the bookseller's son, is certainly not con- 
tradicted by the experience of one who rummages 
amongst the secondhand bookshops of to-day. 

Granted that " The Choice " was the most popu- 
lar, at any rate one of the most popular of English 
poems (amongst the crowd, be it understood) 
Southey's question is not difficult to answer. " He 
who pleases many," said Johnson, " must have 
some species of merit." He described Pomfret's 
merits thus : 

His " Choice " exhibits a system of life adapted 
to common notions and equal to common ex- 
pectations ; such a state as affords plenty and 
tranquillity, without exclusion of intellectual 
pleasures. ... In his other poems he has an 
easy volubility ; the pleasure of smooth metre is 
afforded to the ear, and the mind is not oppressed 
with ponderous or entangled with intricate senti- 
ment. 

The common sentiments were much the same as 
those expressed in another (and a far better) popular 
poem of the same era. Dr. Walter Pope's " The 

53 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

Old Man's Wish." Our young clergyman sat down 
and imagined how, given a free hand, he would 
arrange the rest of his life. Almost everybody has 
done it. Pomfret did it honestly, and, in so doing it, 
naturally reflected the desires of a great many other 
people. '* Blissful ease and satisfaction " was his 
aim ; no crowded hours of glorious life for Pomfret. 
He would have, near a town, " a private seat, built 
uniform, not little nor too great." The desired land- 
scape is described ; the furniture shall not be 
gaudy ; there shall be " a silent study " looking 
out on a lime tree avenue and a river. All the best 
authors will be on the shelves, and the poet's morn- 
ings will be spent " in pleasing, useful studies." He 
will have an estate large enough to have a margin 
for the poor and the occasional obliging of a friend. 
His table will be healthy, but not luxurious, and : 

I'd have a little vault, but always stor'd 
With the best wines each vintage could afford. 
Wine whets the wit, improves its native force. 
And gives a pleasant flavour to discourse : 

We come next to his friends. He will have two : 

whose company would be 
A great advance to my felicity. 

They are to be well born, discreet, knowing books 
and men, " brisk in gay talking, and in sober, grave," 
" close in dispute, but not tenacious," " not 
quarrelsome, but stout enough to fight." And then 
we come to the faithful female friend, whose char- 
acter is described extraordinarily well. A quietly 

54 



JOHN POMFRET 

varied life, free from lawsuits ; a ripe old age ; a 
peaceful death : 

And when committed to the dust, I'd have 
Few tears, but friendly, dropt into my grave. 

" The Choice " has still sufficient charm to be worth 
reading, although in this age nobody even dreams 
of enjoying a quiet life. 

Some of Pomfret's lesser poems are extremely 
weak and dull. The best of them is perhaps a neat 
address " To a Friend Inclined to Marry." Modera- 
tion in all things is the counsel of this as it is the key- 
note of " The Choice " ; and a taste for cosiness is 
again strongly manifested. The last lines run : 

Her fortune competent ; and, if thy sight 
Can reach as far, take care 'tis gathered right. 
If thine's enough, then her's may be the less ; 
Do not aspire to riches in excess. 
For that which makes our lives delightful prove, 
Is a genteel sufficiency and love. 

We may charitably suppose that he put the " suffi- 
ciency " before the love for the convenience of his 
rhyme. But " love and a genteel sufficiency " is a 
delightful Augustan modification of " love in a 
cottage.'* 



55 



CANDID BIOGRAPHY 

WHO'S WHO " and " The Literary Year 
Book " are not such modern institutions 
as you might think or as I thought until 
the other day. I noticed in a catalogue, and at once 
bought for too large a price, a work, one hundred 
and five years old. The title-page is open before me. 
I will transcribe its text, as it illustrates rather well 
how our manner of expressing ourselves has altered. 
The modern equivalent of such a work would be 
given some such name as " The Author's Who's 
Who " or " A Directory of Living Writers." But in 
the year after Waterloo this is how they put it — and 
in a variety of types, small and large, roman, italic, 
and gothic, which I am not going to distract my 
printers by attempting to reproduce : 

A 
Biographical Dictionary 

OF THE 

LIVING AUTHORS 

OF 

Great Britain and Ireland 

comprising 

Literary Memoirs arid Anecdotes of Their Lives ; 

AND A 

Chronological Register of Their Publications, 

With the Number of Editions Printed, 

including 

Notices of Some Foreign Writers Whose Works Have 

Been Occasionally Published in England, 

56 



CANDID BIOGRAPHY 

illustrated by 
A VARIETY OF COMMUNICATIONS 

From Persons of the First Eminence in the 
World of Letters. 

LONDON. 

Printed for Henry Colburn, 

Public Library, Conduit Street, Hanover Square. 

1816. 

There follows a dedication to His Royal Highness 
the Prince Regent, in which his attention to the Arts 
is respectfully commended and the influence of 
Britain in the world is described in Johnsonian 
periods culminating in " Thus have Morals and 
Letters consecrated what Victory has achieved and 
Commerce extended." Paraphrased this comes to 
" Trade follows the Flag, and Morals and Letters 
follow Trade." But let us hasten on. 

The Preface gives the reasons for such a pub- 
lication and supplies, incidentally, the very aston- 
ishing information that the most important previous 
guide to living British authors had been published 
in German, in Berlin, by a Gottingen Professor. 
We then come to the first of four hundred and fifty 
large pages full of biographies, an extraordinary 
monument of erudition. Virtually everybody who 
had ever written a book was included ; even the 
obscurest curate who had let slip a pamphlet sermon 
in Exeter or Lichfield has his line or two giving his 
college and degree. The first name is that of Mr. 
Speaker Abbott (afterwards Lord Colchester) who, 
on the strength of three legal treatises, is given a full 

57 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

length biographical summary, which tells us, for 
example, that he was born " about 1755," and was 
once Lieutenant- Colonel of the North Pevensey 
Legion of Volunteer Cavalry. Ansther Abbott was 
the author of " Flora Bedfordiensis," and the other 
gentlemen on page one include a mineralogist, two 
sermonising clergymen, a legal expert. Dr. Aber- 
nethy, and a Dr. Adair, whose numerous works 
include " Unanswerable Objections Against the 
Abolition of the Slave Trade " (he had a job in the 
West Indies) and a boldly intituled work, " Essays 
on Fashionable Diseases," 8vo, 1790. These speci- 
mens attest the scope of the work ; but how were 
the really great men then living treated ? 

Shelley and Keats were not before the public, 
and Jane Austen was still anonymous, but we may 
make a fair test with Byron, Scott, Wordsworth, 
Coleridge, Blake, Leigh Hunt, Lamb, Landor, 
Peacock, Crabbe, Hogg, and Campbell. The first 
two, already popular, came off fairly well, though 
nothing like so well as Sheridan, to whose compli- 
cated career pages are devoted. Scott, Walter, Esq., 
is described as " one of the clerks of the Court of 
Session, and Sheriff Deputy for the Shire of Sel- 
kirk." Figures of his sales are " subjoined," and 
under the account of Byron we find this rough, rude 
sentence : 

It is remarkable that the two first poets of the 
age should both have been lame from their in- 
fancy ; yet such is the case with Lord Byron and 
Mr. Walter Scott. 

But what of those who are now considered greater 
58 



CANDID BIOGRAPHY 

poets ? Well, here is Wordsworth's biography, all 
he gets : 

Wordsworth, William, Esq., late of St. John's 
College, at Cambridge, and at present distributor 
of stamps for the counties of Cumberland and 
Westmoreland. This gentleman stands at the 
head of a particular school of poetry, the char- 
acteristic of which is simplicity. His publications 
are. . . . 

And all they have to say of Coleridge is : 

Coleridge, S. T., a native of Bristol and for- 
merly a member of Jesus College, Cambridge. When 
the late Sir Alexander Ball was appointed Governor 
of Malta, Mr. C. went with him in quality of 
Secretary. He has latterly been engaged in read- 
ing lectures on Poetry and the Belles Lettres, 
and has published : 

There is no evident malice in this ; merely lack 
of understanding. As for Blake, he is described as 
" an eccentric but very ingenious artist, formerly 
of Hercules Buildings, Lambeth, afterwards living 
at Feltham, in Sussex, and principally the engraver 
and publisher of his own designs." 

There is no literary criticism in the account of 
Leigh Hunt, which ends : 

His last speculation was successful, owing to 
the virulence of its politics, which brought upon 
him a prosecution for a libel against the Prince 
Regent, and he is now in confinement in the New 
Gaol, Horsemonger Lane. 

59 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

There is a slight touch of pleasure about this. It 
is, in fact, everywhere evident that the compilers, 
although they do not resort to boycott, object to 
extreme politicians. Radical journalists are con- 
tinually described as " persons," other biographees 
being usually " gentlemen," and a long life of 
Cobbett contains the statement that the success of 
the Weekly Register, 

notwithstanding the monotonous political ter- 
giversation and occasional coarseness of the 
author, has raised Mr. C. to affluence, and en- 
abled him to purchase a valuable estate, at Botley, 
in Hampshire. 

Charles Lamb is dismissed with four lines and a 
list of works ; they know nothing of him except 
that " he is at present a clerk in the India House," 
and was at Christ's Hospital. Landor has three lines, 
which seem to suggest that his career is over. Pea- 
cock (who had as yet published only three poorish 
books) is one of the minority about whom not one 
biographical fact is given. The Ettrick Shepherd is 
given a few friendly words, and Crabbe is com- 
mended as '* deservedly one of the most distinguished 
poets of the present day." Of Campbell little is said 
except that he was given a pension by Lord Gren- 
ville for writing political paragraphs. Southey's early 
revolutionism is decried, but it is handsomely 
observed that : 

In 1 813 he succeeded Mr. Pye as Poet Laureate, 
and it must be admitted that, with some slight 

60 



CANDID BIOGRAPHY 

exceptions, his subsequent performances are such 
as do credit to the appointment. 

HazUtt, as yet unknown as a critic, is barely 
mentioned. 

Whatever the critical references of the work no- 
body could say it was not lively. Here are a few 
characteristic entries : 

Wilde, John, Esq., F.R.S., and Professor of 
Civil Law in the University of Edinburgh. . . . 
Unfortunately his professional and literary career 
was closed by a sudden mental derangement 
which, becoming incurable, he was confined in a 
private receptacle for lunatics, but out of respect, 
however, to his talents, he was still suffered to 
retain nominally his professorship of civil law, 
and Mr. Irving, the acting lecturer, is obUged to 
allow him half the salary. 

Williams, Helen Maria, This celebrated lady 
has recently published a volume which, if it does 
not completely atone for the bad qualities of her 
former works, will at least entitle her to respect. 

Meeke, Mrs. One of the numerous family of 
novelists whose prolific genius is always labour- 
ing to increase the stock of the circulating libraries. 
Her performances are . . . 

Shirrefs, Andrew, M.A., a bookbinder at 
Aberdeen, who has lost the use of both of his legs. 

Yate, Walter Honywood, Esq., late of St. 
John's College, Oxford, a Justice of the Peace, 
and Deputy Lieutenant of the County of Glouces- 
ter. This gentleman, though a great enemy to 

6i 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

public corruption, and a zealous advocate for Par- 
liamentary reform, was, a few years since, divorced 
at the suit of his wife, on a charge of adultery and 
cruelty. He has published . . . 

How much brighter " Who's Who " would be if 
its biographies were built on this model. 



62 



REJECTED CONTRIBUTIONS 

EDITORS are a variegated lot. Dan Leno 
was once an editor, so was Mr. C. B. Fry ; 
I have been an editor myself, and amongst 
my friends there is an editor who is a man with a soft 
heart. He was exchanging experiences with me this 
week. He said, and I commended him for it, that he 
always made a point of himself reading all manu- 
scripts submitted to him. 

This is more virtuous than some people might 
imagine. It might, at first sight, seem obvious that 
all manuscripts should be read, and all manuscripts 
would be read, by the person who solicited them 
and was nominally responsible for selecting the best 
among them. Ideally, the practice is certainly desir- 
able, and an enthusiast will struggle hard to live up 
to the ideal. But a little reflection will bring the 
realisation that to anybody but an enthusiast there 
is a great temptation to be slack about it, and that 
even the enthusiast encounters very disheartening 
obstacles. A man may be extremely keen not to 
overlook anything worth the printing, and anxious 
to assist promising and obscure authors, but it takes 
a lot of disinterested interest and much patience to 
plough through a daily pile of manuscripts from 
outside contributors. For many of them are written 
in difficult hands, many are long articles or stories 
which are patently intelligent and must be read 
right through before their merits can be finally 
estimated, and even of them those which are really 
suitable for publication in the paper to which they 

63 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

are sent bear a very small proportion to the whole. 
I cannot say offhand what proportion. But judging 
from my own experience of papers which have 
searched their posts with the utmost eagerness for 
acceptable work and have been swamped with manu- 
scripts from an educated public, I should say that 
the accepted or acceptable poems or articles or stories 
cannot amount to one in a hundred of the unsolicited 
manuscripts sent in. It is, I gladly agree, worth it. 
The person who encourages the one in a hundred 
may be doing excellent service to literature, which is 
what literary journalists profess to be there for. But 
it is Serbonian work and the novelty of it soon wears 
off, as the expectation of miracles fades and the 
consciousness of probabilities grows. 

Some unsolicited manuscripts are mad, some are 
hopelessly feeble, most are merely amateurishly 
incompetent. They are probably written by persons 
who never get into print and whose spark seldom 
flickers into manuscript. Writers of very occasional 
poems or stories number thousands, probably hun- 
dreds of thousands. An editor in the course of a year 
will receive great drifts of poems from persons whom 
he knows and whom he never suspected of writing 
verses, and who probably conceal their proclivities 
from their friends pending their recognition by 
acceptance. These no doubt feel slightly damped — 
anybody must — when they are turned down with a 
printed rejection form or even with a friendly, 
wriggling, disingenuous letter in which laboured 
compliments and excuses form a very diaphanous 
covering for the extremely bare fact of rejection. It 
is a beastly thing, to an imaginative man, this job of 

64 



REJECTED CONTRIBUTIONS 

systematically throwing cold water on people's 
aspirations. 

On a certain summer evening, when the sky is 
still green in the west, twenty men and women, 
greybeards, youths, girls with bobbed hair, march 
out (or send out) to pillar-boxes with long envelopes 
addressed to a certain periodical. The envelope goes 
into the red jaws, it sticks, it is pushed, it falls plop 
upon the imagined pile inside, it is irretrievable, 
and the author goes home wondering what is going 
to happen this time. A week passes or a month, and 
then one morning twenty people who have half- 
forgotten or who live in a perpetual fever of remem- 
brance come down to twenty breakfast-tables to find 
lying there twenty envelopes addressed in the well- 
known hands of the recipients. Gloom settles over 
them. Some have doubts about their own abilities. 
All have doubts about the abilities, or the honesty, 
or the carefulness, or the human decency of the 
editor who has spurned them. It is in an editor's 
power to give any one of them an hour's happiness 
(not to mention a guinea or two) or an hour's un- 
happiness. How hard a choice to make. 

I am depressed when I think of any rejected con- 
tributor, but I am depressed most of all when I think 
of the frequently and perennially rejected. The 
most curious tribe of habitual authors in this country 
are those who are known only to editors. There are 
several men in London, a lady in Macclesfield, 
another in Exeter, whose handwritings, styles, and 
manners of thought are as well known to half-a- 
dozen London editors as those of Mr. Conrad, Mr. 
Arnold Bennett, and Mr. Kipling. They enjoy, or 

65 F 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

rather they do not enjoy, a kind of subterranean 
fame. The neighbours of Mr. Noah Davis, of Edg- 
baston, may or may not know that he writes, but 
they know him chiefly as a bank clerk or a school- 
master who is interested in books and wears his hair 
a little longer than is customary. But in five or six 
rooms in Fleet Street or Bedford Street, Strand, or 
the Adelphi nothing is known about him personally 
except his inmost self, his ambitions, his ideals, his 
conception of what he can do, his beliefs about love 
and religion, his vocabulary, his rhythm, and (as I 
said) his handwriting. There are men, very likely, 
who have never seen his face, but who have seen his 
handwriting two or three hundred times. Nothing 
deters him. On Monday his poem on " A Level 
Crossing at Night " goes back to him, and on Thurs- 
day arrives his article on " The Organisation of the 
Provincial Theatre." Pertinacity like that took 
Columbus to America, and it will take Mr. Davis 
nowhere. He cannot know it himself, but everybody 
who ever sees his work knows it. Nevertheless, he 
plugs on. " They haven't got accustomed to my 
thought yet," he reflects, " but even these pudding- 
heads will see light in time." Back comes the last 
thing. There is another ready and away it goes. 
** Dear Sir, I beg to enclose a manuscript entitled 
Dash, which I hope you will find suitable for pub- 
lication. If you are unable to use it would you kindly 
return it. Stamped and addressed envelope enclosed." 
Unfortunate Mr. Davis of Edgbaston. Poor 
Colonel Doggins of Richmond. Sorely-tried Miss 
Martha Jiminy of Penzance. Gallant but misguided 
Edgar Chalkhill of Wimbledon, so young, so keen, 

66 



REJECTED CONTRIBUTIONS 

so immature, so patently incapable of maturity ! 
Some of them keep return envelopes on which their 
addresses are printed ; whether to impress or to save 
the labour of writing I do not know. But every morn- 
ing on the desks of which I am thinking a communi- 
cation from at least one of their brotherhood reposes. 
It will be looked at with a weary eye, and it will go 
the way of all its predecessors. For the manuscripts 
of some authors are like homing pigeons. You may 
release them wherever you like, but they will make 
straight back for the familiar cote. 



67 



AN INDIAN BARD 

JESTING at the expense of Baboo English is 
easy, and it may be done in the wrong spirit. 
Our own undergraduates, if called on to write 
essays in Urdu or Tamil, would beyond doubt equal 
the best efforts of Jabberjee, B.A., and I doubt if 
many of us would be sufficiently enterprising 
(granted that India was occupying England) to 
attempt to compose poetry in the tongues of Hin- 
dustan. There is always a something of admiration 
mingled with my amusement when I see the metrical 
efforts of our Indian fellow-subjects. At the same 
time, it is no good disguising the amusement — 
since, humanly speaking, it is impossible that the 
gentlemen who awake it will ever be aware of it — 
and it cannot be denied that the English com- 
positions of Indians occasionally surpass the worst 
that our native versifiers can ever perpetrate. I 
remember copying out some time ago a remarkable 
quatrain I had found in a volume from Madras, It 
ran : 

In ancient days ere Britons ruled our Ind, 

No man but mocked at Life, at Honour grinned. 

But now benignant British banners have swiftly 

brought 
Security of life and pelf and freedom of Thought. 

Well, a correspondent, out of the goodness of his 
heart, has now sent me a book every page of which is 
on that level. 

68 



AN INDIAN BARD 

Its title is " Priceless Pearls," a good enough be- 
ginning. Its author was Mr. A. S. H. Hosain, and it 
was published at Calcutta in 1890. There is a dedi- 
cation to Sir Steuart Colvin Bayley, at that time 
Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal. Sir Steuart was 
honoured with what the native printer termed a 
" Dedicatory Epitle " in verse. These are two verses 
from it : 

Though Ind has thinned thy stature tall 
The Lion's heart and soul is there. 
There is the noblest human blood, 
May'st thou enjoy the Lion's share. 

With hopeful and with heart sincere 
To thee, my work I dedicate. 
With Lion's clemency I hope 
My humble aim thou will not hate. 

i\.fter which we come to the main part of the book, 
a long poem on the Nativity of the Prophet. 

This is full of delightful quatrains, but I prefer 
to quote from the shorter poems which follow it, 
notably from that on the Cuckoo. We have had 
celebrated poems on the Cuckoo ourselves, and 
they are not notably good. The best known, which 
has crept into most of the anthologies, begins : 

Bird of the wilderness 
Blithesome and cumberless, 

a couplet which, I beUeve, had it occurred in a work 
by a Baboo would have been treated as a rich ex- 
ample of comic English. But we cannot really vie 

69 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

with Mr, Hosain. This is his equivalent of " blithe- 
some and cumberless " : 

Great Natures' wonder great art thou. 
Thy exterior greatly doth belie 
The beauty and the solid worth 
Of thy interior noble high. 

Thou lover sweet of rural seat. 
Thy choicest home is Mangoe tree ; 
Whence thou let'st flow thy music sweet 
With mirthfulness and cheerfulness and glee. 

Some of the lines that follow are normal and straight- 
forward, such as " There is no Autumn in thy 
year " and " Whoever saw thee in the nest ? " : 
but the former is adapted from " There is no 
Winter in thy year " in Michael Bruce's " Cuckoo," 
and one hardly believes that the latter is not also 
borrowed. But he does not remain normal for long, 
and he finishes with this triumphal burst : 

Thy birth is sure celestial birth ; 
The crows as such in reverence hold 
Thee, Cuckoo dear, though wicked most 
They are and most audacious bold. 

Thou mystery-shop, what art thou, say ; 
Why art thou Spring s companion sweet ^ 
Would I could fly with sable wings, 
And be thy sweet associate meet. 

The cuckoo has been called many things, but never 
before a mystery-shop. 

70 



^A^ INDIAN BARD 

A long elegy on his wife contains much genuine 
feeUng. Sometimes the tropes seem very odd in 
English : 

My eyes responded to her eyes. 
Four rivers flowed their rapid course, 
And when they dried I asked her why 
Her rivers flowed with immense force. 

But in places the language becomes simple and 
straightforward under the stress of emotion, and 
some of the stanzas remain aff'ecting in English, 
such as : 

O God ! I do not Houris want 
To comfort me in Paradise. 
Give me my purest Sara there ; 
How splendid were my Sarah's eyes. 

These simple passages, however, do not occur in 
the political and ceremonial poems, where rhetoric 
and ornament are deemed suitable, and are freely 
employed with astonishing results. The poet was a 
strong supporter of the British connection. He told 
his fellow-countrymen : 

On England's icy bosom dear 
Your sleepless, restless heads ye lay 

— as if they were champagne. In a Jubilee ode to 
Queen Victoria he expands this theme, and con- 
trasts the British raj with the despotism of Russia 
and " the liideous hand of Polish bear " : 

71 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

Thou dost not choke our voice, our Empress dear 
Thou dost not smother free thought's babes at all 
We full enjoy our ReHgion's soothing balm, 
And with thy fetters, us, thou dost not gall. 

The best of the many priceless pearls is probably 
the " Ode to Abul Munsur Iskandar Ali, Son of the 
Hon'ble Mr. Ameer Ali, Judge of the High Court, 
Calcutta." It begins : 

Rise sacred Music and sing a song 
Of noble and of glorious birth 
Of Mr. Ameer All's child. 
The brightest jewel on the earth. 

It certainly must have been a remarkable child, for : 

Sweet child ! thy father's image high, 
Thou art thy mother's image too. 

This was a pretty good feat to start a career with, 
unless his parents strongly resembled each other. 

It is no good my recommending this book to 
readers, as I do not think there is the slightest chance 
of any reader being able to obtain it, with whatever 
effort. And, unfortunately, I cannot quote the whole 
of it. I can only make one more extract. It comes 
from a romantic night piece in which the author 
saw a flock of strange singing birds, one of which 
came down, " and on my chest its feathers spread." 
All Nature was peaceful ; every prospect pleased : 

It was the month of Ashshin sweet, 
And Ganges was full to the brim. 
The gentle breeze was blowing nice. 
And Nature's face was without grime. 

72 



^A^ INDIAN BARD 

It is a pity that nobody can compile an anthology of 
such masterpieces. Nobody can, because the authors' 
permission would be required where works are still 
in copyright, and it would be impossible to explain 
to them (or, honourably, to conceal from them) the 
object with which the collection was being made. 



73 



A TRICK OF MEMORY 

I MADE a slip and blush to find it fame, A fort- 
night ago I happened to be writing about an 
Indian poem on the cuckoo. In parenthesis I 
referred to the well-known poem beginning : 

Bird of the wilderness 
Blithesome and cumberless, 

and said, unthinkingly, that it was an apostrophe 
to the cuckoo. It was really addressed to the 
skylark. Needless to say, an admirer of the poem 
popped up with a letter to the editor denouncing 
me as an ignoramus. I'm not quite sure that it was 
my lapsus calami which chiefly annoyed this cor- 
respondent. What he really dishked was the fact 
that I had laid rude hands on one of his favourite 
poems. Of this I do not repent. I admire the author 
of the poem, and I admire parts of the poem itself. 
But " cumberless " appears to me a very cumber- 
some word ; a word even more inappropriate to the 
lark than to the cuckoo. I don't mind betting that 
had I or any poor contemporary addressed the lark 
as " cumberless " not one person but a hundred 
people would write letters of criticism couched in 
the harshest terms. I maintain that " blithesome 
and cumberless " is an abominable line. But in so 
doing I am not attempting to draw a red herring 
across the main trail, or to lead readers into the 
delusion that I have answered the charge levelled 
against me of having stated that the bird in that 
poem was a cuckoo. The bird was not a cuckoo. It 

74 



A TRICK OF MEMORY 

was a lark. I said it was a cuckoo. I was a cuckoo for 
saying it. I noticed the error when too late. I went 
red in the face when the mistake was exposed by 
that irate correspondent. And I went red all over 
when it was given a still wider publicity, put in the 
pillory and exposed to the eggs and carrots of the 
world, by Punch. 

However, I shall survive. I do not take lapses of 
the pen, the tongue, or the memory, very seriously. 
I should not like to pepper every page I ever write 
with errors of fact. But 1 am resigned to their occa- 
sional occurrence, and I am as charitable to them in 
others as I wish others to be when I make them 
myself. There are errors and errors. If I stated 
boldly that " Hamlet " was written in prose and in 
bad prose, it would be obvious either that my mind 
had so weakened that I ought to post straight off to 
Harley Street, or else that I had never read the play 
but was pretending to have read it. A Scotch paper 
once perpetrated a sentence which was stuffed full 
of the sort of errors which really do deserve con- 
demnation and should permanently disfranchise 
their perpetrators in the critical sphere. It was re- 
viewing a Selection from the poems of Francis 
Thompson, and said : 

We do not think that any selection from the 
work of the Author of the " Seasons " can be 
considered really representative which contains 
no extracts from his best-known poem, " The 
City of Dreadful Night." 

Had I written that and been exposed I really should 
hide a head not ordinarily " diminished," but 

75 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

shrunken to the size of a hazel-nut. But surely, 
surely, my poor error was not of that kind ? Surely 
I may advance, and with more cogency than she 
could, the defence of the maid-servant in " Mid- 
shipman Easy " that her offspring was " only a very 
little one " ? And above all it was on the subject of 
the cuckoo, the bird of mocking, the feathered leg- 
puller, whose note in our Elizabethan literature is 
always an ironic echo, the bird which evoked what 
perhaps was the most masterful definition in our 
language. I am in the company of the unfortunate 
wight who, quite without meaning it, said that " the 
cuckoo is a bird which does not lay its own eggs." 
And I am in a larger company than that. I do not 
know that I ever heard a story about a cuckoo, a 
story in which the word " cuckoo " occurred, the 
point of which was not some ridiculous blunder. 
There is, for example, the story (there always is) 
about the curate. He was invited to an immense 
house-party at a duchess's. At tea on the afternoon 
of his arrival he did not speak ; his nervousness 
was painfully evident. Nor did he speak during the 
interval between tea and dinner. Nor during dinner 
could the assistance of two charming neighbours 
and the auxiliary resources of his anxious hostess 
produce from him anything but blushes and nervous 
trembUngs. When the meal was over the ladies 
prolonged their stay for the sake of helping him to 
start. At last hope was given up ; but just as the 
hostess was rising his mouth was observed to be 
shaping itself towards some end, and there was a hasty 
resettlement. All listened anxiously, endeavouring 
to mask their painfully solicitous concentration. 

76 



A TRICK OF MEMORY 

At last he broke the silence. " The c-c-cuckoo," 
he said, " is a m-much larger bird than you would 
s-s-suppose." There is also the story of the tearful 
child who brought back the cuckoo clock with the 
bitter complaint that it ood before it cucked. 

I made a mistake. But the wind that blew in was 
not altogether evil in its effects. For I have finished 
considerably less ignorant than I started. Not about 
poetry, but about cuckoos. For in the course of com- 
posing this explanation I resorted to the dictionaries, 
and dictionaries always leave one richer. I began 
with all the foreign names of the cuckoo — coucou, 
kokkux, cuculus, kokild, kuckuk, koekoek. I then 
learnt (though this I fear I shall not retain) that the 
Cuculidas are zygodactyl and desmognathous. But 
then I came to the slang definition : "a fool," " a 
gowk." It suddenly occurred to me : if I look up 
" gowk " shall I simply see " a cuckoo," " a fool " ? 
So I looked up " gowk," and found to my intense 
astonishment that it originally actually meant a 
cuckoo, being derived from the Icelandic name for 
the bird. How many people who call other people 
gowks know that they are calling them cuckoos ? 
This is a fact worth making mistakes for. The rest 
are not quite so thrilling, and I have no space to 
tabulate them all. But it is something to have started, 
or added to, one's store of erudition concerning the 
cuckoo-bee, the cuckoo-falcon, the cuckoo-fly, the 
cuckoo-shrike, cuckoo-spit (also known as toad- 
spittle and frog-spit). I turn the page and come to 
cucumber mildew and the cucumber flea beetle. 
Good-bye, I am going to spend the evening with 
the letter " C." 

77 



PRIZE POEMS 

PEOPLE may often be heard saying that no 
poet of any merit, and no poem of any merit, 
was ever known to win the Newdigate at 
Oxford or the Chancellor's Medal at Cambridge. 
This is not precisely true ; it wants as much quali- 
fication as that other common generalisation which 
has it that Senior Wranglers " never do anything in 
after life." It is true that these contests do not greatly 
excite good poets, and that the examiners do not 
always know a good poet when they see one. Rupert 
Brooke was defeated on the solitary occasion in 
which he entered for the Cambridge bays, and 
Swinburne failed to carry off the Newdigate with 
his eloquent periods on the last voyage of Sir John 
FrankHn. Yet a fair number of the eminent literary 
men who passed through Oxford and Cambridge 
during the nineteenth century entered and won. 
Matthew Arnold carried off the Newdigate with a 
poem on " Cromwell," and Oscar Wilde won with 
his " Ravenna " ; and at Cambridge the early prize- 
men included Tennyson, Praed and Lord Lytton, 
not to mention persons (such as, in our own time, 
Professor Pigou and Mr. Lytton Strachey) whose 
later w orks have not been classifiable as imaginative 
literature. 

And, as I remarked, the poems themselves are 
not always bad. Only one line from a Prize poem 
has become a common quotation, namely, Dean 
Burgon's (Oxford) description of Petra as : 

A rose-red city half as old as time. 

78 



PRIZE POEMS 

But there are a fair number of whole poems which 
can still be read without tedium, much less nausea. 
I will not go so far as to say that Praed's " Austral- 
asia " (of which I am happy to possess a Senate 
House Copy, 1823) was a masterpiece, but there 
was genuine feeling in it. The associations of names 
change. Australasia to the young Praed was merely 
a place to which convicts were transported, and the 
sufferings of these unfortunates led him to sincere 
but highly stilted passages in the vein of : 

The hapless female stands in silence there, 
So weak and wan, and yet so sadly fair, 
That those who gaze, a rude untutored tribe, 
Check the coarse question, and the wounding gibe. 

Six years later, Alfred Tennyson, of Trinity, won 
with a poem on " Timbuctoo," which is at once a 
model example of how the set subject should be 
taken and a splendid proof that not all examiners 
are dolts. The poem is reputed to have been a re- 
furbishment of an old one on a totally different 
subject. It is quite easy to believe this, the one direct 
mention of Timbuctoo occurring thus : 

Then I rais'd 
My voice and cried " Wide Afric, doth thy Sun 
Lighten, thy hills enfold a City as fair 
As those which starr'd the night o' the Elder 

World ? 
Or is the rumour of thy Timbuctoo 
A dream as frail as those of ancient Time ? 

79 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

It is a terribly obscure poem, but it contains magnifi- 
cent things. The contrast between Tennyson's 
blank verse and the Augustan couplets which had 
won six years earlier is remarkable and significant 
of the transition through which our poetry had just 
passed. Another remarkable thing about Tenny- 
son's success is that an outside critic noticed the 
poem and saw what Tennyson was going to become. 
" Timbuctoo," said the AtheneBum on July 22nd, 
1829, was the work of a really first-rate poetical 
genius: 

We have accustomed ourselves to think, per- 
haps without any very good reason, that poetry 
was likely to perish among us for a considerable 
period after the great generation of poets which 
is now passing away. The age seems determined 
to contradict us, and that in the most decided 
manner ; for it has put forth poetry by a young 
man, and that where we should least expect it — 
namely, in a prize poem. 

Tennyson's composition, said his critic, would have 
done honour to any man who ever wrote. 

The poets have done as well as could be expected. 
But the general dulness, unoriginality, even absurd- 
ity, of the subjects set for the University Prize Poems 
cannot well be exaggerated. I have forgotten what 
was the subject set at Cambridge just before the war 
which was so preposterous that for the first time on 
record not a single undergraduate submitted any 
verses, but I remember that shortly before my own 
time the poets of the University were asked to write 
on " The Coronation of King Edward the Seventh 

80 



PRIZE POEMS 

and King Edward the Confessor." This was a merely 
manufactured subject. I can conceive the unhappy 
aspirants setting to work with lists of comparisons 
and contrasts : as " Resemblance : both called 
Edward," " Difference : earher Edward wore hair 
shirt, later Edward did not." Often enough the sub- 
jects, whilst quite reasonably likely to inspire poets, 
are unfair as putting too great a premium on local 
knowledge of fact. It is all very well to set " Tibet " 
(as was once done), for nobody will have been there 
and fancy can run free. But a year before " Tibet " 
was set the subject was " Durham " — one of scores 
of towns which have been set at Oxford and Cam- 
bridge. How well I remember my first and only 
attempt to begin a poem for that comic competition. 
I had never been to Durham. I knew that the great 
points about it were the picturesqueness of its site 
and the hoary age of its cathedral. The first thing I 
did was to go to reference books, which told me that 
St. Somebody was there in 700, and that a rough 
wicker-work church was built on the site of the 
present, etc., etc., in 800. This didn't do ; I got a 
photograph and let my imagination go. But what 
was the good of that ? Adjectives began pouring in 
all over the place. Yet I did not really know whether 
the roofs in Durham were red or blue, whether the 
houses were grey stone or red brick ; whether in- 
dustrial smoke covered the town, whether it roared 
with machinery or was wrapped in a quiet, like 
that of Bruges-la-Morte. I knew that mistakes in fact 
about an accessible EngHsh town would dish me at 
once. I did not feel inclined to pay for a return ticket 
to Durham on the oft-chance of getting a five-ounce 

81 G 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

gold medal ; so I gave it up. Had the favoured 
borough been Exeter or Truro I should have been 
all over it at once, and the North- countrymen would 
have been the sufferers. 

What on earth made me begin this ? It is all 
right ; but why now ? Well, I have just been told 
the subject set at Cambridge this year, and it seems 
to me a good one. It is occasional, and in the tradition, 
but it happens to be a theme which might well cap- 
ture and fire a young man who began toying with it 
in even the most cold-blooded way. It is just a 
hundred years since the death of Napoleon, and 
the Death of Napoleon is the subject set for the 
Chancellor's Medal. Something more than the 
ordinary neat elegiac verses may come out of this if 
there happens to be in Cambridge at the moment 
an undergraduate of the young Tennyson's quality. 
I don't mean we should expect a great poem. People 
do not usually write such things when very young 
and they do not write them to order. But the sub- 
ject is one which, examiners or no examiners, must 
already have sometimes enforced the attention of 
almost any imaginative young man with a capacity 
for thought. Napoleon is an obvious symbol for all 
the powerful and transient things in life ; career 
and end are intensely dramatic ; and as for the 
" setting," a poet describing " the last phase " has 
half his work done for him before he begins to write. 
An undergraduate with brains, feelings and a natural 
capacity for the best kind of metrical rhetoric may 
— to put it no higher — do a fine tour-de-force on 
this subject, and I look forward to the result with 
curiosity. 

82 



BURTON'S ANATOMY 

I HAVEN'T noticed anybody celebrating, but 
this 1 921 happens to be the tercentenary year 
of the pubUcation of Burton's Anatomy, a 
book which Sterne stole from, which Dr. Johnson 
revered, and which Lamb finally established in its 
rightful high place in our literature. Its author, a 
wrinkled and bearded don of Christ Church (and 
a clergyman), wrote nothing else but a Latin 
comedy. " The Anatomy " was his life-work ; the 
amount of reading and note-making he did for it 
must have been vast. What people who haven't read 
it think it is like I cannot conceive ; but they can- 
not possibly have any accurate notion. Nobody 
would expect, with such a title, to find an enormous 
tome, wherein melancholy, it is true, is anatomised, 
and much play made with humours, fluxions, and 
bile, but in which there are thousands of the queerest 
and most amusing anecdotes and short stories in 
the world. Consecutive reading is unnecessary. 
Pick it up anwyhere, and begin even in the middle 
of any chapter ; you may read on and you will be 
entertained and informed. 

I doubt if many men have read it through. The 
one part to read through is the most famous, and it 
must be agreed the most amusing, section of the 
book, the preface, " Democritus to the Reader." 
The book on the title-page is ascribed to Democritus, 
Junior (D. being, you will remember, the laughing 
philosopher), and the author professes to be strictly 
anonymous. " Seek not after that which is hid," he 

83 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

remarks, " if the contents please thee, and be for 
thy use, suppose the Man in the Moon, or whom 
thou wilt, to be the author, I would not wiUingly be 
known " — this being oddly coupled, in the first 
edition, with the signature, " From my Studie in 
Christ Church, Oxon., December 5th, 1620, Robert 
Burton." The address of the young Democritus is 
the most extraordinary compost of waggery, shrewd- 
ness, whimsicaUty, fantastic learning, originality 
and " scissors and paste " in the language. Any 
good thing that he found in a classical author he 
would make relevant somehow, and he had the 
delightful habit of accompanying most of his quota- 
tions with pithy and full-flavoured translations. I 
will quote a few sentences from this preface. 

Here we have one which contains the Truth 
about Advertising : 

Howsoever, it is a kind of policy in these dayes 
to prefix a phantastical title to a book which is to 
be sold : for as larks come down to a day-net, 
many vain readers will tarry and stand gazing, 
like silly passengers at an antick picture in a 
painter's shop, that will not look on a judicious 
piece. . . . 

. . . Many men, saith Gellius, are very con- 
ceited in their inscriptions, and able (as Pliny 
quotes out of Seneca) to make him loyter by the 
way, that went in haste to fetch a mid-wife for 
his daughter, now ready to lye down. 

You can't put it more strongly than that ! Most of 
his good things bristle thus with the names of the 

84 



BURTON'S ANATOMY 

ancients ; yet his mere choice, and the wording of 
his versions, communicate powerfully the colour 
of his personality. " To be busied in toyes is to 
small purpose, yet hear that divine Seneca, better 
aliud agere quam nihil." " To this end I write, like 
them, saith Lucian, that recite to trees and declaim 
to pillars, for want to auditors." " So that often- 
times, it falls out (which Callimachus taxed of old) 
that a great book is a great mischiefe." " Though 
there were many gyants of old in physick and phil- 
osophy, yet I say with Didacus Stella, ' A dwarf 
standing on the shoulders of a gyant, may see farther 
than a gyant himself.' " Thus all the names in 
Lempriere are tumbled out. But Burton knew what 
he was doing. It was, perhaps, a little cool of him to 
accuse other men of larding " their lean books with 
the fat of other's workes," and to ask, " If that severe 
doom of Synesius be true it is a greater offence to 
steal dead men's labours than their cloaths, what 
shall become of most writers ? " But perhaps he 
said this to annoy the dullards. For his own books, 
though larded with the fat of others, had fat of their 
own ; and the greatest of English patchwork-makers 
was no plagiarist. 

He preferred, it pleased his odd taste, to back up 
the most straightforward of his own reflections with 
a quotation from some recondite dead man. " But 
as Baronius hath it of Cardinal Caraffa's workes, he 
is a meer hog that rejects any man for his poverty." 
His own attitude comes through clearly enough. 
He had not written a religious work. He admitted 
that divinity was the queen of professions, but 
" there be so many books in that kinde, so many 

85 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

commentators, treatises, pamphlets, expositions, 
sermons, that whole teems of oxen cannot draw 
them." But a good deal of his religion comes out, 
and his opinions on social matters are interesting 
and enlightened. He drew the picture of an ideal 
state, where murder and adultery would be pun- 
ished by death, but not theft ; for he had no worship 
of property. Here are a few of his sentences on such 
matters : 

To see a man wear his brains in his belly, his 
guts in his head, an hundred oaks on his back, 
to devour an hundred oxen at a meale ; nay, more, 
to devour houses and towns, or, as those anthro- 
pophagi, to eat one another. . . . 

Wrangling lawyers who ... are so litigious 
and busie here on earth, that I think they will 
plead their clients' cases hereafter, some of them 
in hell. 

[In his imaginary state] hospitals of all kindes, 
for children, orphans, old folkes, sick men, mad 
men, souldiers — pest-houses (not built precorio, 
or by gowty benefactors who, when by fraud and 
rapine they have extorted all their lives, oppressed 
whole provinces, societies, etc., give something 
to pious uses, build a satisfactory alms-house, 
school, or bridge, etc., at their last end, or before 
perhaps ; which is no otherwise than to steal a 
goose, and stick down a feather, rob a thousand 
to relieve one). 

He was anti-militarist, and he touched on the problem 
of unemployment. But one of the most interesting 

86 



BURTON'S ANATOMY 

of his political sentences leads nowhere : "I have 
read a discourse printed anno 1612, discovering the 
true causes why Ireland was never intirely subdued, 
or brought under obedience to the crowne of 
England, until the beginning of his Majestic 's happy 
reign ! " 

The " Anatomy " first appeared as a quarto ; 
the well-known folios came later. It was successful 
from the first, and according to Anthony k Wood 
the bookseller got an estate out of it. Le Blon's cele- 
brated and beautiful title page first appeared in the 
third edition, accompanied by a note from the author 
saying that he would revise no more. But the maggots 
in a head like that are not so easily quieted. The 
revisions proceeded, and even the sixth (posthu- 
mous) edition contained corrections which the 
author left behind in manuscript. Sir Charles 
Whibley, in his recent delightful book, " Literary 
Portraits," has an interesting note on the book. 
" * How comes it,' asked Mr. BuUen in 1893, ' that 
the Editio Princeps of the " Anatomy " is not in 
Christ Church library ? ' There is one excellent 
reason : the copy, which Burton presented to the 
most flourishing college in Europe, is now in the 
British Museum. The inscription on the back of 
the title page is unmistakable : Ex dono Roherti 
Burton aedis hujusce alumni. But how it escaped 
from Oxford to London is unexplained." Possibly, 
during some era when early quartos were under- 
rated, it may have been sold as not being the best 
edition ! I seem to remember that the Bodleian copy 
(now back at Bodley's) of the First Shakespeare 
Folio went similarly astray. 

87 



A VETERINARY SURGEON 

IT is often observed that there have been ages 
when many Englishmen wrote first-class, and 
most Englishmen could write interesting, prose. 
The marks of our Elizabethan and Caroline styles 
are not easy to define. There was a universal move- 
ment of speech just as there is a prevalent tone in 
our folk-songs. But there was more than that. The 
style was the man, or, rather, the nation. The habit 
was to call things what they were, to put on paper 
what you saw and thought as you saw and thought 
it. And specialisation had not set in. A metaphor 
was not considered a waste of space in a " dry " 
book ; personality was nowhere excluded ; even 
State papers were written vividly and racily. To- 
day every book, as it were, bears a label : " This 
book is intended to contain good prose," or " this 
book is not intended to contain good prose." 

Now, if there is one place in which one would not 
look for good, muscular, amusing English that 
place, I should say, is a modern medical treatise, 
and, above all, a treatise on veterinary surgery. 
" Diseases of the Cow," " Some Observations on 
Swine-Fever," " Ovine Obstetrics," " Notes on 
Farcy, Glanders, Epizootic Lymphangitis and 
Anthrax " : confess, reader, that when you see 
such titles as those on a row of books in a friend's 
library, you never think of making a closer acquaint- 
ance with their authors. Yet, time was when veter- 
inary science, like military science and every other 
science, was in close contact with the humanities, 

88 



A VETERINARY SURGEON 

and when it was not considered strange that an 
expert writer on farriery should use the tropes of a 
poet and the periods of a pulpiteer and delight in 
the exercise of that faculty for good speech with 
which God had endowed him. I have just been 
reading a work by such a man. It was published as 
late as 1687 by J. Hindmarsh, at the Golden Ball, 
against the Royal Exchange in Cornhill. Its author 
was Andrew Snape, Junior Farrier to His Majesty. 
And its title is (I give it in its picturesque fullness), 
" The Anatomy of a Horse, containing An exact 
and full Description of the Frame, Situation, and 
Connexion of all his Parts (with their Actions and 
Uses) exprest in Forty-nine Copper-Plates. To 
which is Added An Appendix containing two Dis- 
courses : the one, the Generation of Animals ; 
And the other, of the Motion of the Chyle, and the 
Circulation of the Bloud." 

That was Snape's subject ; and his manner of 
writing was sometimes that of the curious Coryat or 
the waggish Fuller, and sometimes reminds one of 
the eloquent Taylor or Sir Thomas Browne. He 
knew his job. He was a practical man if ever there 
was one : his accounts are clear and first hand, his 
plates look so good that I imagine them to be still 
valid. But he had time for reflection, and he saw 
the horse as part of the Universal Order. You get a 
flavour of his sententious charm in the introduction : 

Now, order of dissection requires that you 
should first begin with the Head, it being the 
most mobile and excellent part ; next that of the 
Chest, and lastly the Belly : but this (as I have 

89 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

said) is not to be done where there is but one body, 
for there you must begin with those parts that are 
most subject to Corruption, wherefor you must 
first cut up the Lower Belly, then the Chest, and 
lastly the Head ; both which ways are often used, 
the first being called the way of dignity, and the 
other of diuturnity ; the one being more noble, 
and the other of a longer durance. 

And it was quite natural to him to begin his book 
proper with a commendation of the horse. " Before 
I take in pieces this Goodly Creature, It will not be 
amiss if I just give you an account of all these Parts 
as they lie in order, beginning with that which first 
appeareth to our View, and that is the Scarf-skin 
adorned with hairs, wherein (as a Case) Nature hath 
wrapped this stately beast." 

I never thought I should spend half-a-day read- 
ing about the nerves and muscles, the livers and 
midriffs of the horse. I love this goodly creature. I 
have even been known to mount this stately beast 
and, on occasion, he hath caused me to fall. But his 
interior has never greatly aroused my curiosity. It 
has taken Andrew Snape to do that, and I could read 
Andrew Snape on anything. Hear the Royal Farrier 
on the horse's hair : 

And hence may be gathered a reason of the 
shedding of the hair, which is observed to happen 
in many Horses that have ill keeping, such as 
your Cart-horses that seldom have any labour 
bestowed upon them, for want of which dressing 
to remove the dust which lieth upon the mouths 
of the pores or at the roots of the hairs, the 

90 



A VETERINARY SURGEON 

passages, through which the juice should come 
that nourishes the hair, are obstructed or stopped, 
and so like dead Leaves from a Tree in Autumn 
they drop off, or as untimely Fruit falls before 
the season of the year requireth it. 

If the cholerick humour doth most predominate, 
then are the hairs of a black, or sorrel or a chest- 
nut colour ; If bloud most predominate, then 
will the Horse be a bright Bay or Roan ; If 
flegme, then the Horse will be of a milk-white or 
yellow-dun ; If melancholy, then will the Horse be 
of an iron-gray or Mouse-dun. Thus much for the 
colour of the hairs, next I come to the use of them. 

The use of the hairs is, first to cover the skin ; 
secondly, to defend it ; thirdly, to be an orna- 
ment to it. 

Even his most technical pages abound with these 
charming passages, and on general topics he is always 
delightful. Take him on germination : 

The Eggs (or Seeds) of Plants being excluded 
out of the Egg-Bed (called a Pod or Husk, or by 
whatever other name distinguished) requiring 
further fostering and brooding, are committed 
to the Earth by the officious Winds or by the 
industry of Men. This kind Mother having 
received them into her Bosom, doth not only 
give them incubation or brooding by her own 
halituous vapours joined with the heat of the 
Sunbeams ; but doth by degrees abundantly sup- 
ply what the fruitful Seeds stand in need of. 

I said that the old common prose was marked by a 
general inclination and ability to call a spade a spade, 

91 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

by a readiness to use apt ornament anywhere, by a 
music to which all men were accustomed. It gained 
much by the homogeneity of philosophy ; every- 
thing was looked at in the light of everything else, 
and God or the dulcimer may meet you on any page 
of a medical book. But there is often something 
more — and even now I have not mentioned that 
adventitious deliciousness that comes from the 
parade of " knowledge " now outworn or obvious. 
I mean the suffusion by a reverent and humble 
spirit, less common among writers now than it was 
in the seventeenth century, or at any rate less easily 
disclosed. I can do no better than end with part of a 
digression that occurs in the middle of the chapter 
on the Muscles : 

I hope no curious and ingenious Anatomist, 
that knows how much time and pains is neces- 
sary to be spent upon the exact examination of 
any one Part, will think me sluggish and supine, 
that I have not in those few years that I have 
applied my self to this study, attained as yet 
to the full knowledge of all the Parts of this Beast 
that I anatomize. And as on the one hand I hope 
I may myself attain to greater skill in this Art than 
I have yet ever arrived at ; so on the other hand 
I would not be guilty of the vanity of thinking to 
monopolize it, but shall both desire and hope that 
others will make up what I shall leave imperfect. 
But thus much I hope may serve for mine Apology 
with all ingenuous Men, I shall therefore return 
from whence I have digressed. 

What could be better expressed ? 

92 



THE LONELY AUTHOR 

I HAD left my friends. I had rather a long journey 
before me, and I thought I would break it. Half- 
way there was a cathedral town, a few miles from 
which is a house where I counted on being put up 
for the night. But I had left it too late. A tardy 
telegram produced the reply that everybody was 
away, so I was left stranded. " Very well," I thought, 
" I will go to a hotel." This I did, but, the pleasures 
of the table exhausted, the hotel provided no others. 
There was no billiard room, and the guests were all 
of that sort of restless and self-centred birds of 
passage with whom it is impossible to enter into con- 
versation, much less get up a four. When I had read 
the newspaper cuttings about royal visits to the 
hostelry and the times at which the stage coaches 
used to leave it for London in Lord North's day, I 
was left without occupation. Like a fool, I had for- 
gotten to get anything to read, having not a single 
volume with me except the latest cheap volume of 
Tarzan from which I had drained the last drop of 
honey — or, should I say, blood — in the train. With 
my most insinuating smile, I attempted to borrow 
something from the lady in the office. She had 
nothing, but told me that the whole library of the 
liotel was in the Resident Visitors' Smoking Lounge. 
My spirits rose, and I went to that room. It was a 
very odd collection. There were about twenty 
volumes in all, including the corpses of old Brad- 
shaws from which the vital spark of utility had long 
since departed. Even I, omnivorous reader as I 

93 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

count myself, cannot hoax myself into curiosity 
about the time at which the fast trains got to Bristol 
in 1888. But the other volumes were not much more 
alive to me. I shut as soon as I had opened the 
grimy bound volumes of the Magazine of Art ; the 
Temple Bar did not detain me. The few novels 
were all books which I had read long since and did 
not wish to read again, " John Halifax, Gentleman," 
being the most notable. There remained three things 
of some interest. The first was an old green book 
about English Freshwater Fish, the second an odd 
(and not the first) volume of an extremely long and 
tedious analysis of Edmund Spenser's poetry, and 
the third an inscribed copy — I supposed somebody 
had left it there — of a long political poem by William 
Allingham. Allingham's signature interested me, 
and I have liked some of his shorter poems, but one 
or two pages of this laborious narrative made it 
plain to me that even the brown trout, the chub, 
the dace and the roach had more charms for me 
than Allingham's blank verse. So with a discontented 
sigh I got my coat and hat and went out into the 
frosty moonlit night. After all, oughtn't a man of 
sensibility to be content with a cathedral town under 
the moon ? 

It certainly was beautiful. There was no traffic, 
and the few pedestrians slank quietly through the 
shadows. In the narrow streets the lamps lit up old 
timbered fronts, gables, and projecting upper stories. 
The river, with a moon reflected in it, ran quietly 
under the old stone bridge, overhung by willows 
insubstantial in the moonshine. Here and there I 
had peeps of the towers of the cathedral, and at last 

94 



THE LONELY AUTHOR 

I came upon the lawns around it whence its huge 
bulk, shadowed with buttresses and statuary, rose 
ghostly to the sky. But passing under an archway I 
came upon a wide enclosed place of shining grass 
surrounded with long Georgian houses, faintly 
porticoed and trellised. Through the lit yellow blinds 
of their upper windows came, as I walked, sounds 
of one music succeeding another, a piano, a violin, a 
voice. It was cold and the place deserted, and it was 
then that I fell to statistics. 

For I was feeUng cold and lonely. It was still, by 
my standards, early. I didn't want to go back to the 
faded carpets, the varnish, the stuffiness, the tawdry 
sitting-room and bleak bedroom of that very historic 
hotel. I wanted talk and company, and in all that 
town there was nobody to whom I had, I thought, 
a right to speak. But nobody ? It suddenly occurred 
to me that I was an author, an author of books. Not 
a very popular author, not an author who counts his 
sales — much less his receipts — by tens of thousands ; 
but an author nevertheless whose works have to 
some extent penetrated the educated population. 
For the first time in my Ufe, as my footsteps rang 
again down an empty and thrice-traversed High 
Street, I made a computation as to the gross total 
of all my volumes which had been purchased by 
the public. There were so many thousands. The 
population of the United Kingdom was, say, fifty 
millions. Take the average number of my volumes 
owned by each of my patrons as two, assume the 
population of that town to be twenty-five thousand ; 
the deduction was that — and as it was a cathedral city, 
full of learned people, the chances were nominally 

95 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

in my favour — in at least two or three houses of 
that town there existed copies of my books bought, 
paid for, probably read, possibly liked by the in- 
habitants. But which houses ? 

Here was I, solitary and chilled. Yet, perhaps, in 
the very house I was passing, whose curtains gave 
me a peep of mahogany, old silver and books, there 
must be one or two strangers within a few minutes 
of me who might even be glad were I to walk sud- 
denly in upon them. I had never heard their names ; 
yet to them, for such is the magic of authorship, to 
them if to nobody else in the whole town, even my 
Christian names were familiar, possibly my age, 
the outlines of my education, the development of 
the talents they were generous enough to have per- 
ceived in me. I attempted to picture what they might 
be like. I had glimpses of a cultivated doctor who 
collected books, of a plump canon's intelligent son 
home for the vacation, of a pair of spinster ladies, 
with wise eyes and greying hair, living at peace amid 
charming furniture, reading a well-chosen parcel 
from Mudie's every week. Whatever they were like, 
there they must have been. Possibly you, reader, 
were yourself one of them, and would have been 
delighted at one — I can't promise that you would 
have liked more than one — visit from so congenial an 
artist. But I passed your door with a sound of foot- 
steps Hke any .other ; I heard the murmur of your 
voice like the murmur of any other voice ; I saw 
the portico of your house for the first time and the 
last, and have now forgotten it. Had you accident- 
ally come to the door I might have spoken. As it 
was I went back to the hotel and was bored. 

96 



CRITICS IN 1820 

THE centenary of Keats 's " Lamia " has just 
— well, I won't say been celebrated, but 
occurred ; and the few people who have 
commented on the fact have dutifully reminded 
themselves how wrong their predecessors were 
about Keats. He was told to go back to his galley 
pots : the Muse could have no relations with a 
Cockney apothecary. Reading these remarks, and 
others about the general guUibiUty of critics and 
their common failure to recognise genius, sent me 
back to those old reviews. 

Certainly they contain a great many deplorable 
misjudgments : so many that one finds some com- 
fort in Leslie Stephen's observation that " criticism 
is an even more perishable commodity than poetry." 
Keats, except from his personal friend, Leigh Hunt, 
scarcely got a word of printed commendation until 
just before his death ; and the sales of those volumes 
which the gallant Taylor and Hessey published 
were grotesquely small. Generally speaking, he was 
treated as a contemptible satellite of the fractious 
Cockney Radical, Leigh Hunt. Blackwood, in an article 
on the Cockney school, perpetrated an extremely 
sweeping sentence, when, after dressing down 
Leigh Hunt, it menaced his " minor adherents 
. . . the Shelleys, the Keatses, and the Webbes," 
not the least remarkable feature of which sentence 
is the bracketing of Mr. Webbe, whose very name 
is now unknown, with two of the greatest of English 

97 H 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

poets. The Quarterly on " Endymion " was almost 
as sweeping. It began its review with : 

Reviewers have been sometimes accused of not 
reading the works which they affected to criticise. 
On the present occasion we shall anticipate the 
author's complaint, and honestly confess that we 
have not read his work. 

They had made efforts, but no power on earth could 
carry them through ; they even questioned whether 
the author could be really called Keats, " for we 
almost doubt that any man in his senses would put 
his real name to such a rhapsody." After several 
pages of trouncing we come to " But enough of 
Mr. Leigh Hunt and his simple neophyte." 

Coleridge and Wordsworth received their worst 
treatment from the Monthly Review, the remark- 
able organ which years before had said that 
" The Vicar of Wakefield " had " defects enough 
to put the reader out of all patience with an author 
capable of so strangely under- writing himself," It 
reviewed " Lyrical Ballads " (which only had one 
review in its first three months) as a mere series of 
imitations of the ancients, with the comment, " None 
but savages have submitted to eat acorns after corn 
was found." The " Ancient Mariner " was described 
as " the strangest story of a cock and bull that we 
ever saw on paper." " Tintern Abbey " was admitted 
to be " poetical, beautiful, and philosophical," but 
" somewhat tinctured with gloomy, narrow and 
unsociable ideas of seclusion from the commerce 
of the world ; as if men were born to live in woods 

98 



CRITICS IN 1820 

and wilds, unconnected with each other ! " " Genius 
and originality " were discovered in the publication, 
but — 

We wish to see another from the same hand, 
written on more elevated subjects and in a more 
cheerful disposition. 

No such reservation was made by the Monthly 
about " Christabel." The rhythms were not to be 
tolerated : 

We have long since condemned in Mr. Scott 
and in Miss Holford and in fifty other males and 
females, the practice of arbitrary pronunciation 
assumed as a principle for regulating the length 
or rhythm of a verse. . . . This precious pro- 
duction is not finished, but we are to have more 
and more of it in future ! " 

Were it not that good writing had died out " it 
would be truly astonishing that such rude, un- 
fashioned stuff' should be tolerated." " The poem 
itself," was the conclusion, " is below criticism." 
Of " The Excursion " we know Jeffrey said, " This 
will never do," and Brougham's review of Byron's 
first book is a classic : 

The poesy of this young lord belongs to the 
class which neither gods nor men are said to per- 
mit. . . . His effusions are spread' over a dead 
flat, and can no more get above or below the level, 
than if they were so much stagnant water. 

99 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

There certainly was weak verse in the book, but 
there was much that was precociously clever, and 
Brougham was absurd when he said, remarking that 
everybody wrote poetry when young, that " it hap- 
pens in the life of nine men out of ten who are 
educated in England ; and that the tenth man writes 
better verse than Lord Byron." 

" Whatever judgment," concluded the Edin- 
burghf " may be passed on the poems of this noble 
minor, it seems we must take them as we find them, 
and be content, for they are the last we shall ever 
have from him." Within ten years the Edinburgh 
had to eat its words pretty thoroughly. It was barely 
ten years afterv\^ards that the great notice of " Childe 
Harold " came out in which Byron was bracketed 
with Rousseau as having " extraordinary power 
over the minds of men," and was told that " his 
being has in it all the elements of the highest poetry." 
And to do reviewers justice, not all of them took so 
long to wake up about everybody. Blackwood may 
have reprobated Shelley, but it called " The Revolt 
of Islam " the work of a genius, and contrasted Shelley 
with his contemporaries : " Hunt and Keats, and 
some others of the School, are indeed men of con- 
siderable cleverness, but as poets, they are worthy 
of sheer and instant contempt." 

Mr. Shelley, whatever his errors may have 
been, is a scholar, a gentleman, and a poet ; and 
he must, therefore, despise from his soul the only 
eulogies to which he has hitherto been accustomed 
— paragraphs in the Examiner and sonnets from 
Johnny Keats. 

100 



CRITICS IN 1820 

Burns obtained recognition from the Monthly 
in the very year of his Kilmarnock volume ; Jane 
Austen's " Emma " received an elaborate eulogy 
in the Quarterly on publication ; and Alfred 
Tennyson at twenty-one was the subject of a full- 
length article in the Westminster Review. It was by 
John Stuart Mill, and began in a characteristically 
Utilitarian manner : 

The machinery of a poem is not less susceptible 
of improvement than the machinery of a cotton- 
mill ; nor is there any better reason why the one 
should not retrograde from the days of Milton, 
than the other from those of Arkwright. 

Tennyson's merits v.ere fully exposed, and he was 
urged (he unhappily acted on the advice) to turn 
himself into a didactic and statesmanlike poet. 

Let us not be too gloomy about the reviewers. 
They are at their worst in an age of technical and 
intellectual transition, when change revolts them. 
Even when we are talking of the Revolutionary 
epoch we must remember that most of the poets 
encouraged each other ; that Charles Lamb was 
early in his perception of the greatness of Words- 
worth and Coleridge ; and that, after all, there was 
Leigh Hunt. He was also a critic, as much as 
Brougham and Jeffrey, and his soundness deserves 
as much notice as their faUibility. He scarcely made 
a mistake ; there was no poetic genius of his age 
whom he did not detect almost instantly. He had 
something of the poet in him ; and the poets, though 
they sometimes made mistakes, are as a rule early 

lOI 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

to discover and sedulous to encourage contempo- 
raries of genius. That any man who, because of his 
poetical knowledge or editorial sagacity or for some 
other extraneous reason, happens to have a new 
book to review should be expected to judge it cor- 
rectly is too much to expect. Jeffrey and Brougham 
were men of great powers, but why on earth should 
we imagine that they would be anything but mis- 
taken about Byron or Keats or Shelley when these, 
in their immaturity, first appeared ? They are very 
inadequate basis for the despairing deduction that 
all critics in all ages must inevitably be wrong, or 
can only be right by chance. 



102 



AN OLD CALENDAR 

THERE is nothing which more vividly and 
acutely evokes the past, the day-to-day life 
of the past, than an old reference book. 
By reference book I do not mean encyclopaedia or 
dictionary : those certainly are reference books, 
but their usefulness is not confined to a particular 
year or generation. They have not the extreme 
topicality of the annual publication, which records 
events of the past year that may never be recorded 
again, which announces as immediately forthcoming 
events that come, and pass, and are then added to 
the cemetery, which contains so much information 
that for a moment is deemed indispensable and 
then is totally neglected, and which, a year or two 
after it has been published, may never be looked at 
again. I daresay that Dr. Johnson's " Dictionary," 
though long ago surpassed in size and accuracy, if 
not in wit, by the works of other lexicographers, is 
consulted thousands of times every year. I am not 
the only person who habitually uses it. But who 
save myself has for an hour this year taken pity on 
the Cambridge University Calendar for 1826 ? Few 
indeed have access to it ; there are probably not 
many copies in existence outside the libraries. It is 
the sort of book men throw away as they do super- 
annuated Whitakers. But here and there one will 
remain on some high shelf in a country house where, 
a hundred years ago, the great-grandfather of the 
present tenant was fresh from the University. It 
was from such a house that the copy I possess found 

103 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

its way into a bookseller's twopenny box ; it has 
come down from the past with something of the 
pathos of a pressed flower ; its freshness has gone, 
but it has a fragrance to the mind ; it was so 
ephemeral and yet it has outlived so much that was 
more solid ; it was grown and blew for one purpose, 
but, preserved, it fulfils another — to recall old things. 
As a pressed violet bears ' some resemblance to 
the violets of last spring, so the University Calendar 
of 1826 is in hue and petal, though the hue has been 
dimmed by time, like the University Calendar of 
1920, Calendars grew smaller in those days ; they 
had not, in flowers nor in works of reference, our 
passion for size. But the shape is similar, the grey 
boards are much like those we know, and the 
arrangement of the information is familiar. The 
volume is printed for Deighton, of Cambridge, still 
existing as Deighton and Bell, and among the seven 
other firms by which it is to be sold are Longmans, 
Hatchards, Simpkin Marshalls, and Parker, of 
Oxford, whose shop is still admirable and still in- 
habited by a learned Parker. Much is the same, but 
much breathes of an old world. The Classical Tripos 
had only just been started ; History and English 
had not been dreamed of as subjects deserving 
whole-time study ; mathematics still held the field 
as the principal study, with theology running it 
hard. The fellows, with a few conspicuous excep- 
tions, were all celibate clergymen, and the most 
casual glance at the names of the undergraduates 
— less than half as numerous as they were when the 
late war broke out — will show that the University 
was considerably less democratic than now. It 

104 



^A^ OLD CALENDAR 

is not that it was what the ignorant call merely " a 
playground for the rich," There were always large 
numbers of poor boys with scholarships — Dr. John- 
son's name need only be mentioned, or Kirke White's. 
But these were mostly sizars, living in a semi-menial 
state ; and great care was taken to distinguish the 
Noblemen from the Fellow- Commoners, the Fellow- 
Commoners from the Pensioners, the last from the 
Sizars. Most of the colleges were very small ; King's 
was still a closed corporation of Etonians. It is often 
observed to-day that Trinity (which has about a 
fifth or a sixth of the undergraduates on its books) 
is disproportionately large ; but in 1826 Trinity 
and St. John's together were half the University. 

It is all interesting to one who knows the ground ; 
great changes can come by imperceptible degrees. 
But the names on the books have a peculiar fascina- 
tion. Lord Palmerston was sitting member. Every 
page is thick with the names of undergraduates sub- 
sequently well known. Tennyson and his group had 
not yet come up, but Frederic Tennyson was at St. 
John's, and among the Trinity freshmen was 
Edward Fitzgerald, whose name appears near the 
bottom of the list between Edward Arthur Illing- 
worth and Thomas Daniel Holt Wilson, who had 
probably not a notion who he was. Spencer Walpole, 
John Wordsworth, Augustus de Morgan, and the 
Iron Duke's young heir were also in statu pupillari 
at Trinity, and the two forlorn sizars at Peterhouse 
included one Ebenezer Elliott, afterwards, no doubt, 
to horrify his college by becoming the Corn Law 
Rhymer, At Trinity Hall F. D, Maurice was in his 
first year, and among the fellow-commoner B,A,s 

105 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

was " E. G. Lytton Bulwer," who had won the 
Chancellor's medal for English verse in the previous 
year. It had been in existence thirteen years only. 
" Timbuctoo," that remarkable adaptation, had 
not yet been submitted. W. M. Praed had been the 
winner in 1823 and 1824, " Thos. B. Macaulay, 
Trin.," in 1819 and 1821, and William Whewell in 
1 814. It was a great feat on Whewell 's part. Few of 
his admirers probably are aware of it ; but it should 
not be forgotten that his natural ear for verse was 
such that in an ostensibly prose passage of one of 
his mathematical works he anticipated the stanza 
of " In Memoriam " with the remarkable sentence : 
" No power on earth, however great, can stretch a 
cord, however fine, into a horizontal line which 
shall be absolutely straight." One of Browne's medals 
in the preceding year had been won by Benjamin 
Hall Kennedy ; the list of his immediate prede- 
cessors included " S. T. Coleridge, Jes." (1792), 
whose name is given a footnote " the celebrated 
poet," indicating that he had made amends for his 
lamentable Cambridge career. Keate and Samuel 
Butler (grandfather of the enfant terrible) were 
Browne's medallists in the year after Coleridge. 
Nobody has ever heard of the man who in 1825 ^^^ 
that remarkable Seatonian Prize for an English poem 
on a sacred subject. The whole list of those who had 
won it is decorated with only one good name, that 
of " Chris. Smart, Pemb.," who took it four times 
in succession from 1750. In 1826 they still did not 
think of him as author of the immortal " Song of 
David " ; his footnote calls him merely " Translator 
of Horace." Some fames take a long time to 

106 



AN OLD CALENDAR 

mature, and a still longer time to get academic 
recognition. But the Calendar did not overlook the 
fact that the fourteenth wrangler in 1819 was now 
" Second Professor in the Mission College, Calcutta." 
1826. It was that year which saw the birth, to a 
Spanish father and a Scottish mother, of Eugenie 
de Montijo, the unhappy lady who after such vicissi- 
tudes and sufferings died the other day. The first of 
the Napoleons had been dead but five years then ; 
every undergraduate remembered hearing the news at 
school. George IV was on the throne, firmly con- 
vinced that he had fought at Waterloo ; Byron had 
died two years before ; it was the year of Scott's 
" Woodstock." Keats and Shelley were as near to 
the young men of that time as Brooke and Flecker 
are to us ; but they were less well known, and only 
the most original of undergraduates were beginning 
to read and talk about them. Yet I suppose that to 
the Empress Eugenie 1826 seemed like yesterday, 
and nothing really an old event that had not taken 
place ten years before it. In 2014 possibly there will 
die some infant of this year who will have acquired 
the reverence due to one who has bridged the great 
gulf of history separating 2014 from ourselves. And 
in that year some wandering eye may light upon the 
Cambridge University Calendar for 1920, now so 
very commonplace, and find it romantic. And some 
mind for a moment, encountering, reader, your 
name or mine in the list of members in the books, 
may linger over it for a moment, wondering whether 
it is mere fancy that that name has been encoun- 
tered before, in an old magazine or between the 
covers of some ragged and forgotten book. 

107 



THE SEAMAN'S PROGRESS 

ALLEGORIES are not in fashion. I, for one, 
am not regretting this. The metaphor and 
the simile are well enough ; they are the life- 
blood of much good literature. An occasional parable 
we can read. But the metaphor which goes on for 
three hundred or six hundred pages we no longer 
want and no one now produces. Probably we are 
right. It is a most irritating thing, as a rule, to read a 
narrative and be conscious all the time of another 
story going on underneath. Nothing is more dis- 
tracting than the uneasy uncertainty as to whether 
there is an allegory present in a work or not. I have 
never enjoyed reading Spenser's " Faerie Queene " 
so much as I did when I was a boy, and was unaware 
that Queen EHzabeth and the Earl of Essex were 
supposed to be involved in it ; and I resent the 
recent, not entirely unconvincing, attempt of a South 
African professor to discover a philosophical treatise 
beneath the multi-coloured surface of Keats's 
" Endymion." I like a person in a story to be a person 
and not a personification. The more uncertain the 
allegory, the more annoying and distracting ; but 
that our modern dislike and distrust of all allegory 
has sense behind it is suggested when one contem- 
plates the allegorical literature of the past and dis- 
covers how little sustained allegory has lasted. There 
are great books with allegorical elements, such as 
" Don Quixote " and " Pantagruel " ; but the 
authors of those had the sense, once they had got 
their general implication clear, to let their characters 

io8 



THE SEAMAN'S PROGRESS 

behave as such, not to force every detail into some 
mechanical symbolic scheme. The one great allegory 
in EngHsh, the author of which really succeeds, is 
" The Pilgrim's Progress." He had to face the 
enormous task which confronts all writers of close 
and sustained allegory and which has utterly beaten 
most of them : the task of making every incident, 
almost every sentence, signify some thought or 
action on another than the obvious plane, and at the 
same time to keep the surface-story so interesting in 
itself that, with full knowledge of its meaning, one 
can, if one Hkes, forget everything except that sur- 
face-story. Bunyan enchants where Phineas Fletcher 
— whose " Purple Island "is, I suppose, the longest 
allegorical poem in English — bores to the point of 
maddening. 

These general reflections sprang from a reading 
of a little book, not well known, I think, which I 
recently came across. Its title is " The Seaman's 
Spiritual Companion, or Navigation Spiritualised," 
by William Balmford, " pubUshed for a general 
Good, but more especially for those that are ex- 
posed to the danger of the Seas," by Benjamin Harris, 
in " Sweeting's Rents, in Cornhil," in 1678 — " price 
bound, one shilUng " ; and it tempts me to add 
that if allegory had never been invented we should 
have missed some of the naivest and most amusing 
things we have. It is the absurd single metaphors 
that stand out as comic in the seventeenth- century 
" conceited " poets ; and the obscurer allegorical 
writers, of course, forcing all their episodes and 
lessons into one series of comparisons, produce 
long strings of these preposterous things. 

109 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

Mr. Balmford was a Bunyan manqui. Writing for 
his sailors in nautical diction (much as obscurer 
writers of prose tracts in our own day will symbolise 
the soul's pilgrimage by some narrative of life on 
the railway : collisions, danger-signals, and the 
Heavenly Terminus) he was ingeniously exhaust- 
ive, and every page of his book contains something 
odd. The oddity begins before the text proper : 
there is a commendatory poem by a lady friend 
(described as " a gentlewoman, who was an intimate 
friend of the author's "), which says, amongst other 
things : 

It is not common for the Female Kind 
In Printed papers to expose their mind : 

a sentence which certainly could not be written to- 
day. There follows an address to the Courteous 
Reader, which states that " the First Part of this 
Book is an Introduction to the Art of Soul-Naviga- 
tion, and ought to have been so Intituled " — the 
separate title-page having apparently been missed 
out by the printer. We are then plunged straight on 
to the high seas with : 

A ship at sea that on the Waves is tost 

In danger every moment to be lost 

Is a true emblem of man's restless state : 

a point that he proceeds to drive home, adequately, 
to say the least, his outline being the thirty-two 
points of the Spiritual Compass, by which the 
Mariner, in this Ocean of Woe, must steer. Here 
are some extracts : 

no 



THE SEAMAN'S PROGRESS 
Rouse up, rouse up, and ply my Pump, my soul. 

A man may erre in faith in three respects. 
All which produce most dangerous effects. 

Hast thou a mind to Traffick for Salvation 
Then learn the art of Sacred Navigation. 

Some ply the Pump, and others stand to sound. 
And all to keep themselves from being drowned. 

In such a case a Saint that's in the world 
Tost to and fro in such a fury hurl'd, 
Is made Sea-sick, and nothing now is more 
A Saint's desire than Heaven its happy shore. 

So 'tis with Christians, Nature being weak, 
While in this world, are liable to leak. 

Presumption and Despair, on these two rocks 
Whoever runs with violence and knocks. 
If on the first of these his soul but hit 
'Tis very seldom but the soul is split. 

Satan that roaring Lyon goes about, 

To shipwreck souls his work it is no doubt. 

'Tis better go to heaven in foul weather. 
Through many dangers, if thou getst but thither, 
Than in a pleasant gale to swim to hell, 
Where gentle winds do make th' canvas swell. 



Ill 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

Our language, for we are a seafaring people, is full 
of nautical idioms. Most of them come into Mr. 
Balmford's poem, notably, " on the rocks." The 
one I miss, and he had many opportunities of using 
it, is " half-seas over." 

Being " tost to and fro," getting into " foul 
weather," and finally " splitting " on certain speci- 
fied " rocks " are all of them very popular expres- 
sions in current political slang, and nothing, 
apparently, does a politician more harm with the 
electorate than to take a line of action that can be 
described in the terms of one or other of these meta- 
phors. Scottish hecklers seem to make a special 
study of them. But perhaps, the most familiar of all 
is the idea of Heaven as a " happy shore," towards 
which we struggle through the raging seas of life. I 
should not care to say how often this metaphor 
occurs in the hymns of the Salvation Army, but I 
remember in particular one verse in which we are 
advised to 

Leave the poor old stranded wreck 
And pull for the shore. 

In the " life-boat," of course. 



If2 



I DO not possess ^^i 5,100 ; that I wish I did is 
irrelevant. Most people wish they did, and do 
not. It is possible that Shakespeare, who was a 
man not blind to the amenities of life, would have 
liked £1^,100. He did fairly well ; he was, if not 
the C. B. Cochran of his day, at least one of its most 
successful managers. He bought New Place and he 
left Anne Hathaway his second-best bed, so that 
(as the Shakespearean commentators say) " there 
is little reason to doubt " that he had two. In his 
quiet way, being a man of taste who liked old things 
and read his bestiaries and books of venery as well 
as his Plutarch and his Montaigne, he probably 
collected books. He may have sometimes given as 
much as eight or nine shillings for some chronicle 
of wasted time produced by the fathers of printing 
or the mediaeval monks. He may have heard of noble- 
men and queens who had paid really large sums, if 
not for books, at least for tooled and jewelled bind- 
ings. But it cannot be supposed that he would have 
been other than surprised had he known that a book 
(or two books together) of his own would, three 
hundred years after his death, fetch ,^15,100 at 
auction, although its contents were everywhere 
available for a shilling or two. 

The mania — I use the word in no derogatory 
sense, for I share it — for first editions is not more 
than a century old. Men liked old books. Horace 
Walpole liked them, Charles Lamb was known to 
forego a new, and much needed, pair of breeches 

113 I 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

for a folio ; many books fetched fair prices in the 
days of " Anglo-Poetica " because they were un- 
obtainable in reprints. Really big prices begin with 
the Roxburgh sale, when magnificent specimens of 
early printing drew the fashionable world to the 
auction-rooms, and there was that contest between 
a duke and an earl for a rare Boccaccio, which the 
Rev. Thomas Dibdin described in phrases which 
would have been something turgid if applied to a 
mortal struggle of Homeric heroes. The first-edition 
cult followed. Prices steadily rose. But it was not 
until the last generation, when American buyers 
stepped into the ring, that the competition for rarities 
really became frenzied and prices prodigious. You 
are now lucky if you get a first-class copy of Herrick's 
" Hesperides " or Keats 's " Lamia " under £i20, 
and the prices paid for Shakespeare folios make the 
sums which excited the world's wonder in the hey- 
day of the Mazarin Bible look ridiculous. Unless he 
makes a find, akin to the discovery of Anglo-Saxon 
pennies in a furrow, the ordinary collector can no 
more hope to possess a " Venus and Adonis " than 
he can hope to become Grand Lama of Thibet. 

I hear everywhere complaints about the monstrous 
prices now prevailing. No book, it is alleged, can 
really be worth 3^15,100 ; this is all a silly fashion. 
That is not a tenable view. If a first edition may be 
worth ;^ioo it may be worth ^^i 0,000. To most of 
us the purest rope of pearls, except as a negotiable 
security, would not be worth ^15,100. The Cullinan 
diamond itself would not be ; in fact, one would 
want to be paid very heavily even to wear it once as 
a stud. At the back of this criticism — which is also 

114 



heard when an enormous sum is given for a picture 
by a great artist like Rembrandt or a second-rate 
artist like Romney — is, I suppose, the feeling that, 
utility apart, the purchaser will not get as much 
pleasure out of a book (of which the text, remember, 
is obtainable elsewhere) as he would out of a similar 
sum expended on something else — modern books, 
for instance, at 6s. apiece. But it should be remem- 
bered that the persons who buy these rarities do 
not starve to do it ; they have all the other pleasures 
they want. Some of them are genuine collectors who 
get the same sort of pleasure out of first editions 
and out of rarities that is got by ordinary collectors 
like ourselves who think twice before paying a pound 
for a book : a few thousands mean no more to them 
than a pound to us. Some are philanthropists who 
desire — like the late H. C. Frick who has just left 
millions of pounds worth of pictures to New York — 
to leave great collections to public institutions. 
Some are adventurous persons who collect as a 
game, and go out to beat their neighbour in the 
competition for rarities. And some are ostentatious 
vulgarians who will do anything which excites 
attention and envy. MilUonaires, rich philanthropists, 
rich romantics, and rich vulgarians are more 
numerous and more opulent in the United States 
of America than in any other country in the world. 
Hence the huge prices for works in the English 
tongue, and hence the constant stream of works of 
art across the Atlantic. 

We hear ordinary collectors lamenting and 
protesting with sneers that prices are grotesque, 
and that the people who buy these books do not 

"5 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

really appreciate them. They fail to observe that 
amongst themselves inequalities of wealth produce 
results precisely the same in kind. One man can go 
to £^, another can go to ^lo and does not hesitate 
to do so. As there are only three copies of " The 
Passionate Pilgrim " in the world, only three people 
would be able to possess them, whatever the price : 
and the selection of those three would be just as 
arbitrary if it were determined by anything else 
than wealth. What the man who collects and knows 
literature intimately can do is something far more 
amusing : namely, hunt for and purchase those rare 
or good books (every year adds to their number) for 
which hundreds of pounds are not yet being given 
by pork- packers : anticipate the market, in fact, if 
not from commercial motives. A poor book collector 
can get as much amusement out of his pursuit to- 
day as he could in any era, though the books he finds 
will not be those that were found when Lamb used 
to pick up Burton and the Dramatists in the mean 
shops off the Strand. And as for the bitterness about 
great rarities going to millionaires and to America, it 
is surely unreasonable. The millionaires do not hoard 
their books for long. They pass them rapidly on to 
public libraries, and, meanwhile, their assiduity 
and their opulence make it certain that copies of 
very rare early books will be preserved which might 
otherwise be lost. After all, if there are only a few 
copies of a book where better could they be than in 
public libraries, where everybody can see them and 
they are open to the consultation of all scholars ? 
And why should not some of them be in American 
libraries ? 

ii6 



Whenever an expensive book (or picture) goes to 
America there is always an outcry for the prohibition 
of exports. The tumult is usually to be observed in 
quarters not ordinarily conspicuous for a devotion 
to literature, whether old or new, or for the slightest 
acquaintance with the technique of collecting. Those 
who make it are apparently far keener on making a 
violent appeal to the emotions than they are on 
thinking about the elements of the question. It may 
be postulated that of every English book, and the 
rarer or the greater the book the more essential this 
is, there should be a copy in the British Museum, 
and copies if possible in a few other great Ubraries. 
They should be there both for sentimental reasons 
and in order that British scholars should have access 
to original texts. It is always (as Mr. Pollard has 
recently said in an admirable article in The Observer) 
regrettable when a " unique " copy of a book leaves 
this country. But beyond this where is the hurt to 
the national interest ? What does it matter whether 
the twenty-fifth copy of a Shakespeare quarto is 
stowed away, unread, behind the wire screen "of 
the Duke of Buckminster's library at Grooby, or 
whether it adorns the marble halls of Mr. Ephraim 
Seltzer, on Lake View Avenue, Chicago ? Surely, 
not a bean. On the contrary, it is highly desirable 
that the Americans should have a good share of 
what are, after all, in large measure their own anti- 
quities. It is often forgotten that the English language 
and English traditions — not to mention English 
blood — are not the exclusive property of the English 
people. Shakespeare antedated even the Pilgrim 
Fathers, and (though those particular Puritans 

117 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

probably did not appreciate the fact) they had as 
much of a vested interest in him as had their relatives 
whom they left behind. The English tongue is the 
tongue of Americans ; our literature is theirs ; our 
first editions are theirs ; and at this date they have 
already begun to take a fair place in our literary 
scholarship. 



ii8 



DICKENS'S FRIENDS 

ONE of the fattest and fullest of recent books 
is Mr. J.W.T.Ley's "The Dickens Circle." 
Mr. Ley has tabulated about a hundred of 
Charles Dickens's friends and, taking them indi- 
vidually or in groups, brought together from 
memoirs and letters a great pudding of information 
about his hero's relations with them. I have enjoyed 
the book. It is about a writer who, to my taste, could 
be less easily spared than all subsequent novelists 
put together. And it is the sort of book which 
demonstrates what interesting literary works may 
be produced by men who altogether lack the gift of 
writing. 

Mr. Ley resembles many compilers of literary 
memoirs, and most " students of Dickens," in that 
almost his sole literary gift is a mastery of the chche. 
At the very outset, when one finds the sentence " If 
it be true that the proper study of mankind is Man, 
it is equally true that men most reveal themselves 
in their relations with men," one knows that all the 
other old sticks will parade across the scene. They 
do, and one greets each with a cheer. " My diffi- 
culty has been to decide what to omit," " Of the 
books I have consulted, I could not possibly give a 
complete list. Their name is Legion " : thus pro- 
ceeds the preface. And the opening sentence of the 
book proper is : " There is no surer test of a man's 
character than to ask, ' Who are his friends ? ' " 
Mr. Ley is the sort of devotee who continually refers 
to Dickens as " Boz " ; on the strength of that 

no 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

alone one could be certain that he would, when 
occasion arose, remark, " 'Tis true, and pity 'tis, 
'tis true " ; that he would say, " It must have been 
a red-letter day for the obscure young newspaper 
reporter on which he learned that his first book 
was to be illustrated by the great George Cruik- 
shank," and that he would speak of death as the 
passage into the Great Beyond. And so he does. It 
is as well to make this clear lest in recommending 
this book to the leisured reader I be supposed to 
imply that its author is another Walter Pater. But 
though Mr. Ley is not an artist in words, it does not 
matter. His labour has been mostly research, and its 
products are mainly quotations and anecdotes. He 
has collected them in such number that the pub- 
lishers are justified in claiming that his is the most 
informative book of the kind since Forster's " Life." 
It is not necessary to read the book straight through. 
If you do you may get tired of the " Dickens Circle." 
Nobody could justly call it a Vicious Circle ; but a 
hundred accounts of the beginnings and develop- 
ments of friendships taken in sequence are apt to 
seem a little monotonous. Besides, there is no 
chronological or other order which demands con- 
secutive reading. As a book to " dip into," with or 
without a preliminary reference to the index, it is 
delightful. You get an immense number of extracts 
from Dickens's letters, many stories, many por- 
traits of " Eminent Victorians," mostly of the not- 
quite-great kind, and an unsystematic but very 
illuminating picture of London in the 'forties. You 
also get the charming oddments dear to that super- 
ficial antiquary who lives in most of us. For 

120 



DICKENS'S FRIENDS 

instance, Dickens, Forster and Harrison Ainsworth 
used to go rides : 

On through Acton's narrow High Street, with 
its quaint raised pavement and ancient red-tiled 
houses, past " Fordrush," Fielding's last well- 
loved home, past EaHng's parks and long village 
green, round through orchard-bordered lanes to 
Chiswick, with its countless memories, and so 
by Shepherd's Bush to Wood Lane and the 
Scrubbs, home again. 

The thought of that sylvan ride on horseback now 
gives one a shudder. It is all new bricks and trams ; 
but then the Bush really was bushy, Wood Lane 
was a woody lane, and the Scrubbs no doubt covered 
with scrub. There is no mention of a meal in this 
passage. This is unusual. Dickens's contemporaries 
ate on the slightest provocation, and a new novel 
was invariably celebrated by a tremendous and up- 
roarious tavern dinner. 

One is impressed again with the unparalleled 
hold that Dickens had upon his generation, a hold 
far wider and firmer than that of Walter Scott or 
of Pope, who commanded the cultured world of 
his day as Dickens never did, but whose influence 
was confined to that world, and was purely an in- 
fluence on taste. Before he was thirty, Dickens was 
one of the most popular men in the English-speak- 
ing world, and years before that he had established 
friendships with many of the most famous men of 
the older generation. His numbers were waited for 
in the mining camps of Australia more eagerly than 

121 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

letters from home ; and he was only just o^er forty 
when a Lord Chief Justice paid him one of the 
greatest, though it be one of the most decorous, com- 
pliments ever paid to an author. Dickens had been 
summoned to a jury, and the judge said : 

The name of the illustrious Charles Dickens 
has been called on the jury, but he has not an- 
swered. If his great Chancery suit had been still 
going on I certainly should have excused him, 
but as that is over he might have done us the 
honour of attending here that he might have seen 
how we went on at Common Law. 

The whole of English-speaking manhood was, in a 
sense, his friend ; and he had as large a personal 
acquaintance with individuals as any other man 
could conceivably have had. 

Mr. Ley ropes them all in, from Samuel Rogers 
to Carlyle, from Lytton to Augustus Egg, of whom 
he says : " In the novelist's home no one was more 
welcome than Egg." Macready, Longfellow, Thack- 
eray, Browning, artists, actors, and poUticians — 
they are all there. They met Dickens in an atmos- 
phere of excessive geniality and, one is bound to 
add, of generous eating and drinking. To scores of 
them, and of scores of them, the emotional and 
open-hearted man wrote with an effusiveness that 
sometimes verges on gush. It is possibly significant 
that numerous though his friends were, they did 
not include many of the reticent type ; it is notice- 
able that the Tennyson chapter is very short, and 
perhaps symbolical that the name of Matthew 

122 



DICKENS'S FRIENDS 

Arnold does not even appear in the index. The air 
of Dickens was a little warm for some. He longs to 
hold his friends in his arms ; he tells one that " I 
will fall on you with a swoop of love in Paris " ; he 
is very free with " Again and again, and again, my 
own true friend, God bless you," and " God bless 
you," and " God bless him," and " God bless her," 
are phrases even more common in his letters than 
in his works. 

He was Tiny Tim, with some of the defects of 
that noble but rather wearying child ; all men liked 
him for his generosity, humanity, willingness to 
work his hardest for others, cheerfulness, and gal- 
lantry ; but they reacted variously to his, as some 
must have felt, almost too opulent benevolence, 
his almost too jolly joviality, his almost embarrass- 
ing affectionateness. Those who like to watch straws 
to see which way the wind is blowing may find a 
perfect straw in the nomenclature of Dickens's 
children. To name one's children after one's friends 
and the objects of one's reverence is a natural and 
excellent habit. But Dickens overdid it. He was not 
content to do the ordinary thing, and his children 
went through life branded with names like Alfred 
Tennyson Dickens, Walter Savage Landor Dickens, 
Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens, tokens at once of 
his sentimental promiscuity and of his intemperance 
of expression. It is odd — no, it is not odd — that 
with all this, all his communicativeness and sym- 
pathy and his multitude of friends, he leaves one 
nevertheless with the impression that the last in- 
timacies of friendship he never experienced. He is 
the same to hundreds, very easily ready to catch 

123 



ESSAYS AT LARGE , 

fire if a sympathetic spark showed, eager to establish 
a contact of hearts with people at first meeting. But 
his friendships, I think, though they strengthened 
with the accumulation of mutual memories, did not 
greatly deepen. All that his friends were likely to 
know of Dickens they knew soon. That is to say, 
they none of them thoroughly knew him ; and I 
have the idea that he did not know himself. After 
reading the whole of Mr. Ley's long story of corres- 
spondences, collaborations, and convivialities, after 
one has seen Dickens a thousand times as a minis- 
tering angel inspiring life-long gratitude, one still 
thinks of him not as this man's friend or as that 
man's friend, but as the friend of the human race. 



124 



POETRY AND COMMONPLACE 

I HAVE been reading the Warton Lecture on 
English Poetry which was recently delivered to 
the British Academy by Mr. John Bailey. It is 
very seldom indeed that anyone talks sense about 
the nature and functions of poetry nowadays. Dis- 
cussion has been furious about poetic technique : 
whether or not people should write in regular rhythm, 
or how far rhyme is permissible. There has also 
been a great amount of talk about the assimilation 
by poetry of modern philosophy, modern science, 
and all the material appliances of modern civili- 
sation. One man has said that rhyme is jingle, 
another that it is a necessity. One man has said that 
the aeroplane and the gramophone are unmention- 
able in verse, another has refused to acknowledge 
the existence of any poet who did not devote his 
principal attention to these machines and things 
like them. Good poets usually know all about their 
business, but they are frequently silent during these 
critical controversies. I imagine that any of the great 
poets who had a capacity for observing and group- 
ing facts and a power of deduction would come to 
very much the same conclusions as Mr. Bailey. For 
Mr. Bailey's contention — implied if not explicit- 
is that most of the controversy is off the point. It is 
a mistake to talk about poetry as though it were a 
new thing, or as though it ever could be a new thing. 
And it is a mistake to conduct an argument about 
the content of poetry except in the light of the body 
of accepted great poetry which we have inherited, 

125 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

and of our knowledge of the human heart and the 
permanent conditions of human Hfe. 

Mr. Bailey quotes a number of passages of which 
I will reproduce one. It is this : 

Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore, 
So do our minutes hasten to their end. 

" Where," says Mr. Bailey, " is the commonplace 
when we hear that voice ? And yet what can be a 
greater platitude than that every moment of our 
lives brings us nearer to death ? The truth, then, 
must be that both the word ' commonplace ' and 
the thing it represents have more in them than we 
at first sight allow. To get the whole truth about 
them we need the old good meaning of the word as 
well as the later bad meaning. A commonplace may 
be obvious, but it may also be a universal truth, 
and as great as universal ; only that its universality 
and its universal acceptance have now blinded us 
to its greatness." He goes on to quote Wordsworth, 
who said that the business of poetry is not so much 
the discovery of new truths as the giving of new 
life to old ones. This, he says, is going too far. Of 
course it is. Poetry springs from emotion aroused 
by the contemplation of life and the universe. The 
material complexion of the universe to some extent 
changes with the progress of invention and dis- 
covery. New philosophies and religious conceptions 
come into being. New refinement of feeling be- 
come known to him who feels. It is quite possible 
that a new Wordsworth may write a great poem 
inspired by the contemplation of the theory of Dr. 

126 



POETRY AND COMMONPLACE 

Einstein. The language and the imagery of poetry 
will change with the changing times ; I think it was 
Coleridge who made a practice of attending lectures 
on physiology in order to acquire new metaphors 
and new similes. But in a certain sense Words- 
worth did not go too far. For in the first place what- 
ever it is that inspires the emotion — the response of 
awe or wonder or life to the beauty and the mystery 
of things — the quality of the emotion remains the 
same. And in the second place the conditions of our 
life are such that the mass of our poetry has in all ages 
been, and will probably be in all future ages, inspired 
by things that do not, humanly speaking, change. 

Let me give an illustration of the first point. Those 
who are so anxious that every new acquisition of 
the race should be embodied in Hterature would 
afford a hearty welcome to the cholera microbe. I 
can conceive all kinds of revolutionary poems about 
that microbe. I daresay that they have been written; 
that they were full of ingenuity, of learning, of Latin 
names, and of unscannable Hnes. They may have 
been informative and interesting. But it happens 
that in the case of the cholera microbe we possess a 
poem by the discoverer himself, a man who cannot 
naturally be charged with indifference to the claims 
of the intellect and of science. He is Sir Ronald 
Ross. The curious — or rather inevitable and not at 
all curious — thing is that he scarcely mentions the 
microbe for its own sake at all. " This day," he 
begins : 

relenting God 

Hath placed within my hand 

A wondrous thing . . . 

127 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

The microbe has merely served as an instrument 
for arousing the emotions, as old as the race, of 
gratitude, wonder, and of triumph. It is from these 
emotions and others like them that poetry springs ; 
work that has not these behind, whatever it is, is 
not poetry. Brainwork is necessary ; observation is 
necessary ; but Milton said that poetry should be 
simple, sensuous and passionate, and Wordsworth 
said that it derived from emotion recollected in 
tranquillity ; and Milton and Wordsworth were 
two of the most intellectual of all our poets. 

But the most important point in relation to the 
theme which is so ably expounded by Mr. Bailey 
is that over and above this there are certain domi- 
nant objects, more than all others capable of stirring 
our emotions and moving us to poetry, which persist 
through all the generations. That this has been so 
in the past requires little demonstration. You may 
start with the epics of Homer, and you will find 
that their principal elements are as familiar and as 
important to us as they were to the man of his day. 
What changes have taken place since then in the 
surface of civilisation, in our manners, in our theo- 
ries, and in our equipment. The gulf between the 
galley and the Dreadnought could be paralleled 
ten thousand times ; yet what is there in the Iliad ? 
A woman's beauty, a war, a conflict of wills, courage, 
cowardice, wrath, grief for a friend, the laughter of 
a child. Where to the Greeks was the appeal of the 
Odyssey, except in that picture of the wanderer 
sailing the strange seas of the world, succumbing 
to temptation, vanquishing obstacles, and return- 
ing at last to his home and his wife ? The test may 

128 



POETRY AND COMMONPLACE 

be applied to almost all the great poetry of the 
world ; the most illiterate audience shares with 
Shakespeare a profound emotion in face of the 
tragedy of jealousy, the tragedy of unfortunate love, 
the tragedy of neglected old age. We may do this, 
that, and the other. We may fly, burrow, and poison 
each other with gas. But to the masses of men the 
principal things in life, the things which loom largest 
and most frequently as the vehicles of that which 
inspires emotion, are what they always were. We 
are all born and do not know where we came from ; 
we all have a childhood on which we look back ; we 
all experience love and the domestic affections, the 
types of which have not changed ; we live in a land- 
scape of which the main features — hills, trees, waters, 
clouds — are permanent ; we all know that at the 
end of our road is death, and after that something 
concerning which we question the midnight sky in 
vain. Into this simple framework are our lives fitted; 
and however a few of us may specialise, and some 
may find in the joy of the novelty of exploration 
oblivion from the conditions of the common lot (a 
phrase which implies a recognition of Mr. Bailey's 
contention), it is in the contemplation of them that 
most men and most poets must inevitably find 
themselves most frequently and most profoundly 
moved. 



129 



SHAKESPEARE & THE SECOND CHAMBER 

IF ever Shakespeare of Stratford is dislodged 
from his acknowledged position as author of the 
plays and poems first published as his, it seems 
certain that a peer of the realm is destined to re- 
place him. None of the iconoclasts ever puts forward 
anyone so humble as a baronet. The most popular 
candidate is still Francis Bacon, I^ord Verulam. 
Roger Man vers. Earl of Rutland, has been sup- 
ported on very insufficient grounds, and last year a 
very learned Frenchman claimed to have traced the 
authorship to William Stanley, Earl of Derby, per- 
haps by way of delicate compliment to our present 
Ambassador in Paris. Now comes a new claimant. 
He is Edward de Vere, seventeenth Earl of Oxford, 
and premier earl of the realm ; the proofs that he 
was the true Swan of Avon are contained in " ' Shake- 
speare ' Identified " by J. Thomas Looney. 

Mr. Looney lets us into the whole progress of his 
speculations. He began in the ordinary way with 
doubts like Sir George Greenwood. Shakespeare 
could not have known all that law, all that Latin, 
all that about sport, all that about Italy. What sort 
of education could he have had at dirty and ignorant 
Stratford, a town ** destitute of books " ? " There 
is no evidence that WiUiam Shakespeare was ever 
inside of a school for a single day " ; why should 
he do so " in the unwholesome intellectual atmo- 
sphere of Stratford " ? What little we know (and we 
certainly do know very little) about Shakespeare 
is commonplace and reflects neither credit nor 

130 



SHAKESPEARE & THE SECOND CHAMBER 

discredit on him. Deciding that Shakespeare was not 
the man, Mr. Looney formulated his own ideas as 
to the sort of man he should look for. He found the 
man — an aristocrat, a lyric poet, a man connected 
^^ ith the stage, a man passionate and tortured by a 
woman, a man travelled and witty — in Lord Oxford. 
He looked up Lord Oxford's acknowledged poems 
and fancied he saw in them (what I do not see) con- 
vincing resemblances to Shakespeare's and a promise 
of mighty maturity. He then examined Lord Ox- 
ford's life and the plays and found what he thought 
striking resemblances between them, including a 
remarkable parallel to the revolting crisis of " All's 
Well." He finally persuaded himself after exhaustive 
chronological researches that Lord Oxford wrote 
" Shakespeare," that Meres and many others knew 
it, that authentic publication was suspended in 1604 
when he died, and that the First Folio was published 
by a secret committee, probably including Lord 
Southampton. Will Shakespeare the actor, who 
had earned scarcely a shilling by acting or manag- 
ing, grew fatter and fatter on the price of his name 
and (possibly ?) on the price of silence. Why the 
deception should have been kept up so long after 
Oxford's death is not revealed. 

Well, it is all very interesting. If ever I get past 
work, past the violent emotions, past a desire to do 
anything or change anything, with everything of 
fire in me subsided to a weak glow, I think I shall 
probably amuse my waking and invite my sleeping 
hours with the literature of the Shakespeare problem. 
To no problem has been devoted so much fruitless 
industry and misplaced industry, none has provoked 

131 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

so much and such far-reaching argument from in- 
adequate premises, argument ranging from the 
briUiant subtleties of clever men ridden with a theory 
to the magnificent tomfooleries of sheer idiots — in 
neither of which categories do I place the sober and 
almost plausible deductions of Mr. Looney. Nothing 
seems to exhaust the question ; this year it is Lord 
Oxford, next year it may be the Earl of Devon, or 
Lord Lonsdale, if there was a Lord Lonsdale then. 
Now the evidence is mainly cryptogrammic, now 
it is sartorial, now it comes out of the plays, now out 
of private documents, now out of the secret records 
of the Rosicrucians. An enormous number of Eliza- 
bethans have not yet been tried as possible authors 
{e.g., Queen Elizabeth herself), and a vast amount 
of Elizabethan literature has still to be searched, 
sifted, decoded for clues. This controversy is not 
going to stop ; the mystery of Shakespeare really 
is sufficient of a mystery to guarantee an apostolic 
succession to the Hne of Donnellys and Gallups and 
Lefrancs and Looneys. The literature they produce 
offers inexhaustible amusement of a mild kind to 
the man who does not believe in them or expect to 
be converted. And I do not expect to be converted. 
I have seen enough of men of genius to know that 
they may come from the most surprising places, 
learn the most surprising things, and behave in the 
most surprising way — even to the point, Mr. Looney, 
of accumulating money and retiring into the country 
on it — even to the point of living normally among 
their county neighbours without leaving that " very 
strong impression " which Squire Shakespeare, of 
New Place, for all his powers (and perhaps because 

132 



SHAKESPEARE & THE SECOND CHAMBER 

he did know so much of men), apparently failed 
to make upon his neighbours at Stratford. I think 
Shakespeare may well have been, to Stratford, 
normal : the imaginative view of him at home was 
well developed in Mr. Thomas Hardy's tercentenary 
poem. I can swallow the lawsuits, the acting, the 
will, the second-best bed, the fortune, and the feats 
of self-education, and even the Stratford bust, far 
more easily than I can this monstrous figment of a 
conspiracy, known to very many people and men- 
tioned by none, this cloaked and skulking author of 
rank never convicted of the greatest works the human 
brain ever conceived until three hundred years after 
his death. Especially do I not believe in that widely 
shared secret. Suppose Mr. Thomas Hardy, with 
the collusion of Lord Balfour, Lord Hugh Cecil, and 
Lord Haldane, and the co-operation of the Poet 
Laureate, Mr. Gosse, Mr. Gerald du Maurier, Mr. 
Owen Nares, and others, had over a long period of 
time attempted to palm off the authorship of his 
novels and poems, for private reasons, upon the 
late Sir H. Beerbohm Tree. Does Mr. Looney 
seriously suppose that it would not have leaked out ; 
that nobody would mention it in letter or diary ; 
that nobody, after the masquerader's death, would 
pass it on by word of mouth ; that the grand secret 
would only be arrived at after elaborate textual criti- 
cism in the year 2220 by some American lady or 
retired English judge ? Alas, no ! Secrets are not kept 
like that. 

But I will say this : that there are two small things 
that make me wish that the Looney theory could be 
true. One is that if it were, Cambridge University 

133 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

(my own college in it) would have a final argument 
to clinch its contention that it is unequalled as a 
nurse of poets. The other is that I really hate to 
think that the author of the " Midsummer Night's 
Dream " was anything like the bust on Shakespeare's 
tomb at Stratford. There is reason to believe (I 
think an illustration to Dugdale is the authority) 
that the Stratford bust has been altered since it was 
put up. The original face was not that podgy, com- 
placent mug which now produces automatic rapture 
in tourists, but which must inspire him who looks 
at it in an unprejudiced way with feelings of 
repulsion and contempt. It was, according to the 
rough old engraving, a more worn and hollow, if a 
more morose, face. But even that earlier bust was 
unlovely, and Edward de Vere (the Duke of Rut- 
land's portrait of him is a fine and convincing work) 
had a beautiful, proud, spirited face with all 
passion and all laughter latent in it. The First Folio 
portrait one cannot discuss because Mr. Looney — 
and there is the crudest kind of resemblance in 
general outline — holds that it was meant to be a 
portrait of Oxford. They could scarcely have dared 
publish such a portrait of any man while he was 
alive. . . . And yet the devotees, who will never 
yield an inch, often bring themselves to maintain 
that the Folio face is a fine face, just as they will 
maintain, on the strength of those Planchette sig- 
natures, that the man of Stratford wrote a fine bold 
flowing hand. He did not. But in spite of Mr. Looney 
I still think, in the absence of proof to the contrary, 
that he wrote the plays published over his name. 



134 



ON BEING A JONAH 

I HAVE never much cared for the minor prophets, 
as men. Circumstances, of course, were against 
them. They fell upon evil times, and it was their 
duty — one sometimes beats down the suspicion that 
it was also their pleasure — to spend most of their 
time denouncing those who offered up burnt sacri- 
fices in high places or walked in the way of the 
children of iniquity. Their forefingers were fixed 
in the posture of accusation, and their favourite 
monosyllable was " Woe." They were disinterested 
men, but brooding, angry, vehement, sometimes 
soured, men. Amongst them all I have always felt 
least sympathy for the prophet Jonah. A certain 
compassion with him in his submarine period we 
must all, of course, have felt. But he is not an attract- 
ive character. His vindictiveness against the Nine- 
vites was extreme. I have not my Bible with me, but 
I seem to remember that he was disappointed when 
they were not all extirpated : Jehovah was too 
merciful for him. A morose, splenetic, fanatical, 
black-avised man. 

I feel a little closer to Jonah now than I did. 
They say that men, the survivors from some great 
shared enterprise or calamity, are bound together 
by a comradeship of experience. It is so ; millions 
of soldiers can attest the fact. It is something of this 
kind that has drawn me closer to the prophet Jonah. 
Contact has been estabHshed. We have suffered 
alike, and we have something in common. Now I 
hasten to add that I have not been swallowed by a 

135 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

whale. Nor do I expect to be. Palmists who have 
examined my clerkly hand have predicted many and 
various fates for me, numerous early deaths in the 
most diverse circumstances, deaths by field and 
flood, ship and railway. But not even a palmist — 
and palmists stop at little— has ever told me that I 
should, mortally or othersvise, lodge in the belly of a 
great fish. It is not this ; it is the immediately prior 
experience that has, though by proxy, befallen me. 

I discovered that one of my works had for some 
weeks been out of print. I asked my publisher why 
this was. His answer took the form of a file of corres- 
pondence received by him. The first letter (as this 
is not an advt, I suppress the name of the book) 
was from a firm of printers in Scotland. It ran : 

Dear Sir, 

We have received a communication from the 

Shipping Company informing us that 

the s.s. , which sailed on the 20th inst., has 

been aground and that a portion of the cargo had 
been jettisoned. We despatched by this boat the 
undernoted on your account, and shall be glad to 
know at your earliest, if any or part of it has been 
received. 

The undernoted consisted of a thousand copies of 
me. Enquiries followed ; a letter passed the other 
way ; and a second communication came from 
Caledonia : 

Dear Sirs, 

We are in receipt of your letter of January 2nd, 
and regret to hear that the 5 bales have been 

136 



ON BEING A JONAH 

jettisoned, which confirms the report we have 
received. 

We are sorry to say they were not insured by 
us. 

And finally, the binders woke up. They, too, appar- 
ently, had been all agog to receive my works ; look- 
ing forward to binding them. But they were men 
accustomed to concealing their emotions, typically 
English, reluctant to make demonstrations of sorrow 
or wear their hearts on their sleeves. Their letter 
ran : 

Dear Mr. , 

The 5 Bales of above have been thrown over- 
board we have found out. 

Yours faithfully, 

There ended the dossier. 

I have endeavoured, lying awake in the darkness, 
to reconstruct the scene. The sailors, I think, were 
slightly dubious about Jonah from the first day out. 
They thought there was something a little sinister 
about him. He was not " simpatico," not (as the 
Esperantists so compactly put it) " samideano." 
That first day out of port they looked at him with 
sidelong eyes, and wondered whether they wouldn't 
have preferred a black cat or a Friday sailing. The 
second day they thought seriously of dumping him 
into a barrel of pork in order to express their dis- 
like and distrust. The third day, as you will see, 
there was nearly a mutiny over the fatal five bales 
of incomprehensible books. Similarly, I conceive 

137 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

that these mariners, who out of all that cargo selected 
my works for sacrifice when the moment for sacrifice 
came, had scented in them something they disliked 
from the start. 

The steamer, I think, was going down the Firth 
of Forth, in a dead calm, with the black smoke lying 
flat and thick behind her, when some idle seaman, 
clambering over the cargo, came upon those five bales 
and wondered what they contained. One of them 
had a slight rent through which protruded a glaring 
yellow cover. Ben Gunn, or Ole Petersen, yielded, 
tugged, and began to peruse. He shifted his quid, 
and knitted his brows ; he uttered a full-flavoured 
nautical equivalent of Stevenson's young man's 
exclamation on seeing the old Athenceum : " Golly, 
what a paper ! " Very gingerly he stuff"ed my in- 
comprehensible compositions back into the sack, 
and went to ruminate. At evening in the fo'c'sle 
he grumbled to his mates that there was something 
unlucky on board, gibberish in what looked like 
English and bore some resemblance to verse. All 
along the Lothian and Berwick coast when darkness 
fell the watch cast glances of malediction upon those 
sacks, whose canvas faintly shone in the lantern 
light. 

The wind freshened. It rained. The wind whistled. 
It sleeted. The wind roared. The sea rose. Lurching 
and pitching she went ahead, drifting shorewards, 
shipping water at every roll. Through the mirk 
could be descried a lee shore, cliffs, one or two misty 

lights. " We must Hghten or " shouted the 

captain to the first officer. " Aye, aye, sir," repHed 
the first officer to the captain. '* Is there any cargo 

138 



ON BEING A JONAH 

with which the world could easily dispense ? " asked 
the captain. " Yes, sir," said the first officer ; " there 
are many volumes of Herbert Spencer, ten crates 
of gramophones, and the collected edition of Mr. 

's speeches." " I like them all," said the 

captain. " Please suggest something else." At this 
point the conversation was cut into and so was the 
Gordian knot. A bronzed and bearded sailor stag- 
gered up ; holding on to the taffrail with one hand and 
touching his forelock with the other, he explained 
that the crew refused to do another hand's turn 
unless five bales of books by Squire were thrown 
overboard. " We knew, sir," said he, " that there 
was suthin' fishy about them books the moment 
they come aboard. This ship won't come to no good 
until they be over the side." There was no argu- 
ment. The unhappy books, speechless themselves, 
had no defenders. Ten men with glittering eyes and 
bared teeth crawled towards them, two to a bale. 
They seized them, and with a last vengeful curse 
flung them far out into the maw of an advancing wave. 
A thousand copies ! Down they fell, through the 
boiling wrath of the sea's surface, into the more 
equable waters below, and, in zigzag shift, settled 
to the sandy bottom. There they lie at this moment, 
in the little depressions they have made. It is a fine 
day and something of sunlight filters down to them. 
One of the sacks has burst open and its fatigued 
contents have tumbled out ; shut, gaping, open 
wide, face upwards, face downwards. Odd corners 
of print can be seen ; and at intervals through the 
opaque green a phantom fish glides up and, with 
staring eyes, slowly wagging its fins and gills, gapes 

139 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

at this pile of indigestible matter. Then he goes 
away. And I, for one, don't blame him. 

But I have my consolations. Those ruffians may 
have thrown me overboard. But it did not save 
them. They were wrecked. 



140 



VALOUR AND VISION 

" A S the primary object of this little book is 
/ \ to help a cause dear to the heart of most 
X A. English people, an excuse for the appear- 
ance of yet another war anthology is, perhaps, not 
so necessary as some explanation of the motives 
guiding the choice and arrangement of the poems." 
This is the opening of the prefatory note to Miss 
Jacqueline Trotter's " Valour and Vision." The 
profits from the book are to be devoted to the In- 
corporated Soldiers' and Sailors' Help Society ; 
but as it happens the book would have been justified 
without that. It is true that there have been numbers 
of war anthologies (the latest was the biggest and 
the worst), but none of them until this has been 
satisfactory. The compilers of most of them have 
had no other qualification for their task except an 
indisputable patriotism and a total incapacity to 
distinguish between genuine poetry and imitative 
verse. Miss Trotter's book is on another plane. She 
has missed very few of the good poems, whether 
by soldiers or by civilians, inspired by the war, and 
she has included very little rubbish. There are here 
a few poems that can only be called doggerel. Most 
of them relate to the Navy. The Navy, I suppose, 
had to be represented, but it is traditionally speech- 
less. The great rush of civilian recruits with literary 
tastes went into the Army ; some joined the R.N.D., 
but those fought and wrote as soldiers. Whatever 
the reason, literature has not come from the Navy, 
and the celebrations of its vigils and its victories has 

141 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

been mainly left to civilians, who have sat down, 
invoked the shades of dead admirals, remembered 
that destroyers are lean, and pounded out verses as 
hollow as they are, superficially, lively. These 
blemishes might well be removed from the book, 
but it is a beautiful selection, and (I think) the first 
which has been arranged with intelligence and 
imagination. Miss Trotter has recovered the war 
atmospheres in sequence. She opens with Mr. 
Binyon's fine " Fourth of August " : 

Now in thy splendour go before us, 
Spirit of England, ardent-eyed. 

Enkindle this dear earth that bore us. 
In the hour of peril purified. 

and ends with some beautiful lines by Mr. Lyon : 

Now to be still and rest, while the heart remembers 
All that it learned and loved in the days gone past, 

To stoop and warm our hands at the fallen embers. 
Glad to have come to the long way's end at last. 

Now to awake, and feel no regret at waking, 
Knowing the shadowy days are white again, 

To draw our curtains and watch the slow dawn 
breaking 
Silver and grey on English field and lane. 

Between these there is work, reflecting every domi- 
nant thought of the war, by nearly a hundred writers ; 
and a great deal of it remains good even when one 
contemplates it in the most detached way. 

142 



VALOUR AND VISION 

They used to discuss the effect of war on litera- 
ture. The question is insoluble because it is too 
general. There are wars and wars. It is arguable that 
good poetry is the product of a general spiritual and 
emotional atmosphere, and that one war may pro- 
duce a favourable atmosphere and another not : 
that, for instance, the nation must be in grave peril, 
not obviously fighting a smaller and weaker foe, 
and that its cause must be universally accepted as a 
just cause. Certainly all these elements were present 
in the late struggle ; had they not been it is possible 
that the feelings which are dominant here, love of 
Hfe, reverent tenderness for England and fond 
lingering on every detail of her landscape, calm and 
proud acceptance of death, would not have existed, 
or at any rate not with this intensity and clean cer- 
tainty. And it is from a clean and strong emotional 
response to beauty, whether it be moral or physical, 
that good poetry comes. The revival in poetry had 
begun before the war ; there had been the beginning 
of a return to a poetical, which is to say a healthy, 
outlook ; but without making any rash statements 
about wars in general (many of which have been 
disastrous to the spirit and some of which have had 
no demonstrable effect upon Hterature) it is indis- 
putable that this war of England's — a perfectly just 
war against great strength, a war in its immediate 
motives chivalrous, a war which brought all the 
best of the country's youth willingly face to face 
with death — directly produced much beautiful and 
exalted feeling. 

Many things are described by these poets : war 
by land, air, and sea. Amongst the more descriptive 

H3 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

poems are some not generally known. I had not 
myself seen Mr. Jeffery Day's extraordinarily vivid, 
cunning, and buoyant " On the Wings of the Morn- 
ing," an account of a flight which takes one right 
through it. We have here the workings of conscience, 
struggles against the apathy and materialism that 
threatened us in 191 7 and 191 8, protests against the 
beastliness and cruelty of war and the moral dangers 
that threaten nations engaged, revulsions against 
the kiUing of ignorant enemies. 

Oh touch thy children's hearts, that they may 

know 
Hate their most hateful, pride their deadliest 

foe, 

wrote Robert Palmer, just before he died in Meso- 
potamia, and Mr. Paul Bewsher, setting off on a 
bombing ride : 

Death, Grief and Pain 

Are what I give. 
O that the slain 

Might live — might live ! 
I know them not for I have blindly killed. 
And nameless hearts with nameless sorrow filled. 

But more than anything else it was the beauty of 
life and nature, and above all the beauty of England, 
lost, perhaps irrecoverable, that the personal and 
the national peril most deeply drove into the hearts 
of the soldiers who fought and sang, and of many 
of those who brooded at home. 

144 



VALOUR AND VISION 

Marching on I'anga, marching the parched plain 
Of wavering spear-grass past Pangani river, 
England came to me — me who had always ta'en 
But never given before . . . 

Hungry for Spring I bent my head, 

The perfume fanned my face. 
And all my soul was dancing 

In that Uttle lovely place, 
Dancing with a measured step from 

wrecked and shattered towns 
Away . . . upon the Downs . . . 

O bronzen pines, evening of gold and blue, 
Steep mellow slope, brimmed twilit pools below. 
Hushed trees, still vale, dissolving in the dew, 
Farewell ! Farewell ! There is no more to do. 
We have been happy. Happy now I go. 

A dust which England bore, shaped, made 
aware, 
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to 
roam, 
A body of England's, breathing English air. 
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home. 

These extracts could be paralleled a hundred times ; 
and less locally, the emotion inspired by the new 
beauty of things that might be snatched away 
blazes hot in what is possibly the finest of all the 
poems of the war, Julian Grenfell's " Into Battle," 
where the soldier, his courage confident, his peace 
made with Death and the Universal Will, rejoices 
in the grass, the horses, the stars, and the birds : 

145 L 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

The blackbird sings to him, " Brother, brother, 
If this be the last song you shall sing, 
Sing well, for you may not sing another ; 
Brother, sing." 

If a man feels like that he writes poetry. 

With the exclusion of a few poems and the sub- 
stitution of a few others Miss Trotter's book would 
be as good as a book of the kind could be. Only one 
of Rupert Brooke's sonnets appears ; the whole five 
should be here. The Poet Laureate's verses on Tra- 
falgar Square are a serious omission. Flecker 's ring- 
ing *' Burial in England " should have accompanied 
his " The Dying Patriot," which is relevant to the 
war but was written before it, and Mr. Freeman's 
" The Stars " should as certainly have gone in even 
at the cost of leaving out one of the three poems by 
him which have been chosen. Mr. Brett- Young's 
" Bete Humaine " beautifully expressed some- 
thing not expressed elsewhere ; there is a sonnet 
by Edward Thomas which is lacking, so is Mr. 
G. K. Chesterton's " The Wife of Flanders," and so 
are those majestic lines which " A. E." contributed 
to The Times. The sombre poems by the late Wilfred 
Owen were, I suppose, published too late to be taken 
in, but two poets from whom something should 
certainly have been drawn are the late E. A. Mackin- 
tosh and Mr, Ivor Gurney, who in " The Poet Before 
Battle " spoke nobly and naturally for all his craft. 



146 



REAL PEOPLE IN BOOKS 

THE other day I met an acquaintance who 
looked unusually depressed. Depressed is 
perhaps scarcely the word : in his air was a 
mixture of resignation, sadness, and reproach, re- 
proach born rather of sorrow than of anger. " Well," 
said his expression, " I didn't think you'd do it, 
and possibly you didn't know you would hurt me. 
But it was a careless blow, and though I have far 
more courage and stoicism than you think, I shall 
not easily recover from it." If his expression did not 
say all that it should have said it. It was not, I was 
happy to feel, addressed to me ; from me he sought 
rather consolation, those sweet lies which have been 
balm to many a wound. He had been badly hurt. 

An old friend, a practising novelist, had put him 
into a novel. He was not the villain of the novel ; far 
from it, he was, if anything, one of the heroes ; he 
appeared very little and did several kind deeds. He 
was described as handsome, honourable, rich, moral ; 
and a hundred attributes were bestowed on him, 
the imputation of which could be resented by no 
sensible man. But the portrait was a recognisable 
one, and among the most accurate things about it 
were the indications of vices, or of weaknesses 
scarcely worthy of that name : let us say dislike of 
mental discomfort, unpunctuality, a slight defect 
of will. It was impossible to deny that the portrait, 
where it was not just, was flattering. Yet it was re- 
sented, as I think a truly faithful portrait by a friend 
would be resented by any man. It was resented as 

147 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

not merely unkind (for one's friends should spare 
one) but unfair. And the notion of unfairness was 
easily traceable by an examination of my own breast. 
It was unfair, the victim felt, to depict any fault as 
a friend's fixed characteristic. For what are our 
faults ? Not, to ourselves, permanent elements in 
us ; at least not things necessarily permanent. They 
are rather smudges on a pane, cobwebs in a corner, 
which we could (and which we may) remove to- 
morrow if we liked. We may not think it worth 
while — for the moment— to pull ourselves together ; 
but all the pride of our unique personality rises in 
anger when the suggestion is made that the smudge 
is a flaw in the glass, the cobweb a part of the fabric. 
It is cruel to pin a man down in this way ; he hates 
to feel that there he is, with a description in print 
from which he will be unable to escape, which will 
hang like a millstone around his neck ; the whole 
world, as it were, conspiring to prevent him from 
changing. The least our friends can do is to refrain 
from telling, and especially from writing, the truth 
about us. 

At best, to those who feel that decent behaviour 
is more important than any book, using real people 
as characters is a dangerous business. In the in- 
stance to which I refer I think no act was imputed 
to the character which he had not committed ; but 
even that did not prevent the wound. We must 
admit that novelists and playwrights may, always 
W'ill, usually must, make use of the personalities of 
people whom they know. Not invariably. If a man 
writes a play about Nero he does not look around 
amongst his friends, however Neronic many of them 

148 



REAL PEOPLE IN BOOKS 

may be, to find a model for his principal character : 
he knows enough about Nero, though he never saw 
him, to give his imagination a starting point. He has 
a face, and the main features of the type and the 
individual : he wants to borrow nothing from A 
the journalist or B who lives in the Albany. But 
where contemporary fiction is concerned, though 
there have been novelists whose brains generated 
purely invented people as well as derivative people, 
it is an immense aid, whatever sort of person is 
being described, to bear (at the start at all events) a 
particular human being in mind. It is an obli- 
gation on the man who does this to disguise his 
character beyond recognition where there is the least 
possibility of off^ence : unless his whole purpose be 
offence. 

There have been in our day a great many novels 
in which men and women one knew, or knew about, 
have appeared with no attempt at disguise : some- 
times with every effort to ensure identification. 
There are living politicians, painters, authors, who 
are known to many people only through their alleged 
portraits in books. Novelists have contracted so 
habitually the custom of making things easy for 
themselves and securing a cheap pungency by 
drawing on their knowledge of Mr. Snook, R.A., 
Sir John Pigment, or Lady Jane Dolt, that many 
readers, when they get a new novel of the " moeurs 
contemporaines " kind, ask as they meet each fresh 
character, " I wonder who this is meant for ? " We 
continually find, within a week of a new novel's 
appearance, a rumour running round London to 
the eftect that So-and-So is in it to the life or that 

149 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

So-and-So gets it hot. This in a fiction is not the 
game, and the more reaUstic and convincing the 
fiction the worse it is. A man is introduced : his 
face, clothes, house, family, profession, achieve- 
ments are precisely described ; his gestures and 
the very accents of his voice are reproduced ; and 
he is carried through a series of actions of which 
some are totally fictitious and others are copied 
from actions he is known to have performed. This 
is unpardonable : it is simply telling lies about a 
real person, lies which, if they sound likely enough, 
may cause not merely pain but serious practical 
embarrassment. 

For me I should, I freely confess, be hurt if a 
friend, and annoyed if anybody else, set me truth- 
fully down without imputing to me anything false. 
I should be furious if I were, in a recognisable way, 
described and represented as doing things, obviously 
piggish or merely not to my taste, which a stranger 
or an acquaintance might pardonably suppose that 
I had done. The one sort of work in which I, or any 
man, need not mind being described, however 
accurately, and carried through actions, however 
unlikely, is a thoroughgoing shocker. Much as I 
should loathe appearing " under a thin disguise " 
as seducing somebody or indulging in wholesale 
backbiting (things not uncommon and liable to be 
believed of any man to whom they are imputed), I 
should not mind in the least if a novelist painted me 
as vividly as possible, made identification certain, 
even spelt my name backwards, or even spelt it 
forwards, if he made his story obviously false. He 
could take me and do what lie liked with me : make 

150 



REAL PEOPLE IN BOOKS 

me emulate the hero of the " Brides in Bath " story, 
run a baby farm, blow up the Houses of Parliament, 
or accumulate a fortune by burglary or the abstrac- 
tion of pennies from bUnd men's tins. These crimes 
are not merely crimes that I have not committed 
and have not (I most earnestly assure you) any in- 
tention of committing ; but they are crimes which 
nobody who knew of my existence (and the others 
are not in question) would suppose me to have com- 
mitted. Murders and highway robberies galore may 
be saddled upon my counterfeit presentment : I 
shall not merely not mind, but I shall (so strange is 
the constitution of the human mind) be openly 
pleased. But the deeds that I might conceivably 
commit and don't : from the suggestion of these 
God save me, and us all. It does not matter being 
the subject of a fairy-tale, but it is most disagree- 
able to be the subject of scandalous gossip. 



15' 



RAILROADIANA 

I WAS looking over a list of sales to be held this 
spring in New York by the American Art Associa- 
tion, the Sotheby's of America. All the usual 
things are to come up : incunabula, illuminated 
manuscripts, first editions, four Shakespeare folios, 
etchings by Whistler, eighteenth-century illustrated 
books. My eye lingered lovingly on some of these 
categories. I mused on these treasures three thousand 
miles over the horizon, most of them emigrants 
from their English homes. But one entry aroused in 
me not a sentimental hankering, but wonder. A 
gentleman, or the executor of a gentleman, is dis- 
posing of a collection of what, with fine courage, the 
cataloguer calls *' Railroadiana." Why should he 
not ? We have Shakespeariana, Baconiana, and 
Johnsoniana ; nevertheless it looks odd — almost as 
odd as " aeroplaniana " and " oilenginiana " will 
look fifty years hence. 

I suppose that this hoard of " railroadiana " (we 
should still call them " Railway Items " or " Books, 
etc.. Bearing on the History of Locomotive 
Traction " in this country) will probably consist 
mainly of works illustrating the development of 
railways from George Stephenson onwards. It is 
early as yet, and the chances are that the man who 
made the collection was himself a railwayman or 
what is called a railway magnate. I don't think that 
railways have yet got into the field of vision of the 
collector proper. But they undoubtedly will when they 
are slightly more venerable and when information 

152 



RAILROADIANA 

about their origins is more patently useless and 
recondite. To-day it is the railwayman who forms 
libraries about his industry. When railways have 
been transformed or, better, abolished, it will not 
be the traffic experts who will know about nine- 
teenth-century railways. It will be the bookworms 
— men who could scarcely drive a perambulator, 
much less an engine ; just as if anybody is collect- 
ing information about Alexander's campaigns we 
may be sure it is not a soldier. Everything, when it 
gets hoary, falls into the net of this one class of 
enthusiasts, the dustmen, the rag, bone, and bottle 
men of human history. In our great-grandsons' day 
there will be bald and spectacled collectors who will 
know by heart the names of the railway systems of 
our day, and will spend fortunes upon precious 
scraps of information about those half-forgotten 
institutions. And the queer thing will be that they 
will search with most zeal not for large and author- 
itative books but for odds and ends that we regard 
as negligible. Posterity's tastes are always surprising. 
To-day men collect, and will give large sums of 
money for, horn-books : little contraptions from 
which Queen Anne's children, numerous but early 
dead, learned their alphabets. Children's books of 
a later date form the substance of specialised collec- 
tions ; where (as with some of the early compositions 
of Charles and Mary Lamb) they bear famous names 
they will fetch their hundreds of pounds, enough 
money to keep a labourer's family for a year. There 
are always collectors who go off the beaten tracks of 
early printing and first editions of the dramatists 
and prefer to devote themselves to out-of-the-way 

153 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

literature which will illustrate some aspect of social 
life. The more ordinary and common the literature 
was in its own time the more likely, as a rule, it is 
to be scarce ; yet it is from this sort of thing that 
we are likeliest to get a peep into the minds of the 
generality of our ancestors or a notion of their day- 
to-day lives. The antiquary of the future who wishes 
to know what our own time was like will get a very 
distorted picture if he possesses the works of Mr. 
Swinburne and Mr. Conrad and has never heard of 
" Home Notes " or Mr. Garvice ; if Sir Edward 
Elgar's symphonies survive, but not " Get Out and 
Get Under " or " Pack up Your Troubles." Yet 
copies of these will be few and hard to get at. The 
hawkers a hundred years ago sold chapbooks in the 
streets ; elderly dons now accumulate collections 
of chapbooks with the utmost pains. The old ballads 
were hawked to the poor at a penny or twopence ; 
to-day " a really fine collection of Broadsides " will 
make the dealers of two continents prick up their 
ears. Almanacks were common enough, being things 
useful to everybody in the days of the Tudors. But 
people bought them to use them, not to stack them 
on shelves or stow them away in lavender, and the 
Bibliographical Society was performing an im- 
portant service to research last year when it pub- 
lished a catalogue of Early English almanacks, many 
of them of the first rarity. So it will be with the 
commonest printed wares of our own generation. 

Railroadiana ! Yet in a century or two some of 
these very railroadiana may be in wide demand by 
classes of people who at present think railways be- 
neath a scholar's or an artist's notice. Books about 



RAILROADIANA 

mechanical locomotion will be valued in their degree 
according to age, scarceness, and intrinsic interest. 
But it may well be that the real gems will not be 
books, properly so called, but literature which we 
see but scarcely notice on every table and on every 
wall. Men hang up to-day as curiosities, in the 
dining-rooms of old coaching inns, time-tables, 
yellow and quaint, giving the arrivals and departures 
of the York or the Exeter Mail. The proprietors of 
our most venerable theatres point with the greatest 
pride to play-bills of the eighteenth century, com- 
mon printed sheets once thrust (for I suppose they 
did such things) under every door, and now almost 
as rare as primroses in December. If our odd civili- 
sation continues, as much will happen to the an- 
nouncements and the time-tables of 1920. I can 
visualise entries in Sotheby's or Hodgson's catalogue 
of 2120 : 

Lot 2140 : Board of Trade Regulations for the 
Carriage of Live- Stock by Rail Dated 1920 and 
signed by H. Jones, Permanent Secretary. BrilUant 
Impression in perfect order. This document 
throws a great deal of light on much-vexed ques- 
tions relating to social life under George V, and 
some of the detail is very entertaining. Much of it 
relates to dogs, cats, pigs, etc., the transport of 
which seems to have engaged much of our an- 
cestors' attention. To the precise determination 
of charges they seem to have devoted a dialectical 
subtlety which would do credit to Socrates. Only 
one other perfect copy of this most curious record 
is known to exist, and there is none in the British 
Museum. 

^5S 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

Lot 2642 : A series of six " Posters " bearing 
on various aspects of the war against the old 
Empire of Germany. No. i — A Soldier's Cap, 
with inscription " If the Cap Fits Wear It " ; 
No. 2 — Picture of Britannia fighting the Dragon 
of Prussianism ; No. 3 — Rescue of British child 
carrying basket of food, from German by English- 
man ; No. 4 — Picture of typical twentieth- cen- 
tury cottage, " Is not this worth fighting for ? " 
etc., etc. The two first are not known to exist 
elsewhere. 

Lot 5621 : Election " Poster " dated 191 8. 

The picture is torn across and its exact nature 
cannot be deduced, but the text — an appeal to the 
voter to return the Duke of Walton (then Mr. 
Lloyd George) — is intact. 

These things will come up on some afternoon of 
2120 ; but the pearl of the sale will very Ukely be a 
set of " Bradshaws " and " A.B.C.s " covering a 
period of years. What a mine of information our 
posterity will find those despised guides, which 
we regard as purely utilitarian, and throw away as 
soon as we think them out of date ! What numbers 
of stations, and trains, and routes, and fares they 
specify ! Where else will the scholar, where else the 
investigator of Social Development be able to look 
for information at once so accurate and so compre- 
hensive concerning an important department of our 
lives ? And where else will the antiquary, the biblio- 
phile, the collector be able to recover so much fra- 
grant detail, such countless suggestions of the lives 
that we, a quiet, jaded, picturesque, slow-going, 

156 



RAILROADIANA 

but robust, simple and merry race of people led in 
an England not yet urbanised, modernised, or devel- 
oped in accordance with the later conceptions of 
applied science ? Men often lay up money or lands 
in order to insure the fortunes of their descendants ; 
men have been known, trusting to their ability to 
scent a rising market, to stock their houses with 
pictures with the same object ; it is reported that 
in America of recent months prudent men have 
been doing their best for their progeny by laying 
down cellars of wine. But I doubt if a man who is 
willing to take really long views and can trust his 
children to obey the terms of his will, could do better 
than lay down in dry, warm bins, not to be dis- 
turbed for two centuries, a complete file of " Brad- 
shaw's Railway Guide." That is what will be rare ; 
that is what they will really appreciate and covet ; 
that is what will fetch the money. Failing that, any 
non-literary relics, provided these are sufficiently 
common and (at present) insignificant, will do. An 
air-gun, a few sets of Ludo and Halma, an opera-hat, 
a football cap, a signed photograph of Sir Henry 
Irving, a few pairs of flannel trousers — a collection 
like that, kept in good condition, would some day 
be worth its weight in gold. These things would be 
regarded as — and perhaps they really are — the bones 
of history. 



157 



ON BEING SOMEBODY ELSE 

I HAD recently an experience that I had not pre- 
viously imagined : a journalist attributed to me 
a pseudonymous book that I had not written. 
If the book had been some very trashy novel 
there would have been obvious reason for annoy- 
ance. The point is that it was not a trashy book. 
On the contrary, it was an unusually good book of 
its kind ; a book which has been generally praised 
as brilliant ; a book which I have praised myself ; 
a book full of knowledge v/hich I do not possess and 
sagacious epigrams which my poor ingenuity could 
not have constructed. Yet I was very upset, fever- 
ishly anxious to get the canard (which means a duck) 
stopped. It was not modesty ; I do not deceive 
myself there. It was not a generous desire not to 
be credited with powers that are not mine or to filch 
(which means steal) the honour rightly belonging 
to some other man. Much as I might wish to be 
thoroughly moral, I do not think I should ever get 
really excited, really angry, because I had been 
given credit that I did not deserve. Far other\vise. 
My immediate thought was : " Good Lord, I don't 
want anybody to think I wrote that ! " All the great 
merits of the book faded away before my mind's 
eye. The few things I actually did dislike about it 
grew to gigantic size, and swarms of quite imagin- 
ary defects came into existence and buzzed around 
them. I felt as though I had rather anything would 
happen than that I should be supposed to have 
written that book. The eyes of the whole population 

158 



ON BEING SOMEBODY ELSE 

(in reality superbly indifferent to the matter and 
ignorant of my existence) were centred on me, and 
their lips, to my anguish, said : " There is the 
author of that mysterious book." I did not care 
whether I leapt up in the estimation of these millions 
on account of this supposititious performance. All 
I was aware of was a desperate anxiety to rid myself 
of this imputation. I felt that I hated that book worse 
than any book in the world. " If it had been another 
book ! " I impatiently exclaimed ; and then I 
paused, for the truth began (as it sometimes does 
begin) to dawn on me. 

The question came into my head : should I have 
felt like this about any other book ? I put it to myself 
concretely in detail. Suppose somebody had im- 
puted to me the authorship of one or other of the 
three or four novels considered the best of our time } 
I had no sooner put the question than the repudia- 
tion surged up in my throat accompanied with a 
flood of bitterness. Or such-and-such a fine play ; 
or So-and-So's epic ; or the collected poems of 
somebody else, which I have so often and so enthusi- 
astically eulogised ? I began to find that the answer 
was the same : I should not like it. Mr. Jones is no 
doubt a great novelist, but I could not bear to be 
considered guilty of that vulgar passage on page 
323. Mr. Smith's plays draw me to the theatre when- 
ever they are staged, but I should be miserable if the 
pubhc supposed me capable of his lapses in English. 
Mr. Green's English is undoubtedly beautiful ; 
but has it quite the highest kind of beauty ? and, 
anyhow, would it not be intolerable to be presumed 
to hold his views about morality ? Book after book, 

159 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

all as highly reputed as contemporary books could 
be, paraded before my mind, and instant objection 
was taken to all. Isolated passages might be borne 
with equanimity or even boasted with pride ; but 
as wholes, no ! I am glad that such works have been 
written, but there is not one that I should like either 
my friends or strangers to suppose that I had written 
under an assumed name. This book shows a lack of 
humour with which I should loathe to be saddled ; 
that a flippancy which I enjoy as reader but surely 
could not have been guilty of as writer ; to be 
esteemed the possessor of Mr. White's great powers 
of ratiocination would not compensate for the dis- 
grace of his constant misquotations from languages 
which he does not understand ; and how could 
one hold up one's head if people really deemed one 
capable of such heavy obtuseness as Mr. Black was 
guilty of at the beginning of his tenth chapter, other- 
wise very penetrating ? Some of Mr. Pink's lyrics 
would be charming to own, but I should blush with 
shame if it were I who were thought guilty of harp- 
ing so frequently on his one string. Whatever my 
faults, I thought, blushing, I am not such an ass as 
to go on doing such a thing as Pink does time after 
time. 

The train of thought continued. I wondered if I 
could stomach being saddled with the whole works 
(for being identified with another author must mean 
that) of any author from the birth of recorded time. 
Should I find that even Homer would be too ex- 
pensive at the price of his occasional nods ? I tried 
them one after another. I have a great admiration 
for Lord Tennyson. " The Revenge " and others I 

1 60 



ON BEING SOMEBODY ELSE 

could appropriate with pleasure, but not if I am to 
be deemed the nincompoop who wrote : 

What does little birdie say 
In his nest at break of day ? 

or the most pompous passages in " The Princess." 
I should at once disclaim identity with Words- 
worth, with all his greatnesses, rather than be sup- 
posed capable of committing " The Idiot Boy " ; 
Keats 's odes might be well enough, but what about 
some of those awful trivialities that lurk in corners 
of his books ? I should write to the papers at once if 
anybody credited me with the contorted sentences 
of the great Carlyle, or the cynicism of the great 
Byron, or the humourless stiffness of the great 
Milton. Would I, I wondered, even be able to bear 
it if I were supposed the perpetrator of the gross 
remarks of Falstaff or the bad word-play of lyaunce- 
lot Gobbo ? I think not. 

So colossal — for I have the consolation of being 
sufficiently scientific not to think my characteristics 
unique — is human vanity ; or, more pleasantly, so 
obstinate is one's attachment to one's own person- 
ality. Just as we would be burdened with no man's 
works, unaltered, so we would exchange natures 
with no man. I doubt even if there is a man alive 
who would exchange faces with another, though most 
faces are, on the face of them, inferior to others. 
A feature or two might be borrowed perhaps : 
smaller ears from one man, or a straighter nose 
from a second, or a whiter nose from another, or a 
slight accession of hair from a third. But a man 

i6i M 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

would not take another man's face intact : he would 
want to preserve his own, however modified, his 
own recognisable as the old one ; he can stand fifty 
blemishes that are born with himself better than one 
which is proper to somebody else. And, for his in- 
tellect, taste, emotions, information, he would not 
for anything replace them with somebody else's. 
Other people may be better than he in parts, but 
they all have vices which he lacks, and these defects 
he could not bear to contract. In our own secret 
hearts we each and all of us feel, however poor our 
outward performances, and whatever the trivial 
and eradicable weaknesses of which we are con- 
scious, superior to the rest of the world : or, if not 
superior, at least " different " with a difference that 
is very precious and beautiful to us, and the base of 
all our pride and perseverance. 

How disturbing, distressing, and humiUating it is 
to contemplate the truth about oneself ! But how- 
consoling it is that the minds of all our neighbours, 
those refined men in the club, those complacent or 
harassed people in the Strand, contain equally 
strange secrets ! 



162 



A COMMONPLACE ^OOK 

STRICKEN with the prevailing malady and 
too clot-brained to think, I rummaged leth- 
argically among a box of old papers. I was 
on the Micawber Trail. The best conceivable thing 
that might turn up would be some forgotten un- 
printed essay which would at once save me the pain 
of writing when not really equal to it, and at the same 
time, perhaps, produce the bogus but useful im- 
pression that this hardened sermonizer had suddenly 
recaptured the first freshness, the spontaneity and 
the peach-bloom of youth. The hope was not cher- 
ished seriously, for there were no grounds for it ; 
it was entertained merely because it was comfort- 
able. Naturally that essay, carefully composed and 
precisely suited to the occasion, did not turn up. 
There is no such essay in that box. There is no such 
hidden treasure in any box of mine, and least of all 
would this box contain any. I did find two essays in 
it. One was headed, in a fair round hand with a 
fair thick line drawn under the title, " The Char- 
acter of Oliver Cromwell," and the other, also 
beautifully superscribed, had for its theme the 
question, so captivating to the novice who has just 
pushed open the enchanted gates of Political Science : 
" Is the State an Organism ? " These titles show 
how old was that box and how old were the papers. 
" I remember, I remember the house where I was 
born." The laburnum may still hang its clusters 
there, but "I'm farther off from heaven than when 
I was a boy," and the width of the gap was as 

163 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

apparent to me as it was to the poet when I noted 
with what high seriousness I had once reflected on 
the organic or inorganic complexion of the State. As 
for Cromwell, my views seem to have been un- 
settled ; but one sentence, as I read this estimate 
of him, came back to me like a remembered scent. 
It was dubiously relevant ; in fact, rather blatantly 
dragged in by the scruff^ of the neck. " Some men 
are born pious, some achieve piety, and some have 
piety thrust upon them." The indirect, not so very 
indirect, reference was to a current controversy 
about compulsory Chapels ; but the erudite man 
to whom that sentence was solemnly read aloud did 
not betray by any blink or quiver a consciousness 
of the fact. Why should such compositions have 
been kept, yellowing year after year, for nearly 
twenty years : lugged, unlocked at, from city to 
city and house to house, while the Free Trade 
election, and the Veto election, and the Franco- 
British Exhibition, and Signorinetta's Derby, and 
the Wright Brothers, and the Ulster conflict, and a 
five years' War came and went ? There lie their stiff, 
creased, foolish folios for all the world as though 
there were still some use for them, as though their 
whole period of usefulness was not measured by 
those quarters of an hour in which they satisfied, or 
were taken as satisfying, a person in authority. But 
it is less easy to destroy old rubbish than new, and 
even new rubbish struggles hard for survival ; and 
they went back into the box. 

There were papers there of all sorts, letters, un- 
receipted bills, a picture postcard of a giantess, 
programmes, fixture cards, and a silk rosette on 

164 



A COMMONPLACE BOOK 

some vanished day emblematic of heaven knows 
what ! But I came at the bottom on one of those 
exercise books with bhie sides, down which run 
many little zigzag lines of crescents and thin 
cylinders in white and red. What on earth, I thought, 
with something of the emotions of an archaeological 
digger in Egypt or Sicily who sees a bronze foot 
sticking up through the new soil, what on earth can 
this be ? It might have been a volume of adolescent 
verse, escaped the flames through some accident. 
It might have contained notes (taken down) on the 
constitution of Athens or (self-made) on Prescott's 
" Conquest of Mexico." I suppose it might have 
contained, were it early enough in date, cricket 
averages ; I know it might have contained, had it 
been very early indeed, a translation of y^neid II 
into the metre of Macaulay's " Armada," nicely 
vigorous, perhaps, for the passage in which those 
horrific serpents ramp over the waves to Laocoon, 
but not entirely suitable for the more solemn and 
the more touching moments. 

Reluctant to exchange the liberty of the conjec- 
tural for the shackles of the real world I stood there, 
my fingers resting on the unopened book, racking 
my brain for memories of what it might have been. 
There came into my mind the recollection of a time 
when a youth, spasmodically industrious, made a 
practice of copying into just such books sentences 
which had struck him when perusing the greatest 
works of the greatest masters. A queer hotch-potch, 
remembered indistinctly, in patches. Most of the 
observations of Dr. Johnson were there transcribed : 
which should count unto that youth for righteousness. 

165 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

There were many mots from Gibbon. One of 
them, thus recorded in adolescence, still sticks in 
my mind. It is perhaps the largest exaggeration in 
any serious history : "A thousand swords were 
plunged at once into the bosom of the unfortunate 
Probus." Truly, an imperial death ! Bacon was 
scoured for this repository of wit and wisdom ; it 
contained enough Montaigne, Macaulay, Sterne, 
and Burton to supply the calendar makers with 
** thoughts for the day " for another century. Aristotle 
was there in some force ; nor were the poets lack- 
ing. Was this volume before me one of those, once 
loved and long lost ? vShould I recover an old critical 
mood transfixed ; would the result be a contemptuous 
pity for a former rawness and solemnity, or would 
the volume be a pool in which I should contemplate 
Narcissus-like features familiar if not without reser- 
vation admired ? I was on the point of turning the 
pages when memory made one of her sudden sur- 
prising revelations. The covers of those old note- 
books stood clear and vivid before the inward eye ; 
they had not been blue, they had both been shiny 
black, of a limp stiffness. What had been blue ? 

Then I thought I remembered. Yes, that was 
blue. The very thought of it brought to my wasted 
cheeks a blush of shame and guilt. It was a diary. It 
did not get very far, but what there was of it must 
have been very abominabre. It was not a healthy 
diary saying that I had been for a walk with Jones, 
been given a hundred Hnes, or observed a hoopoe 
or a Smith's warbler, or rejoiced over the result of 
the Boat Race. Introspective it was, written under 
the shadow of " The Sorrows of Werther," bought 

1 66 



A COMMONPLACE BOOK 

second-hand, and the " Diary of Marie Bashkirtseff," 
strangely encountered and unobtrusively borrowed 
in my last holidays. What pompous reflections on 
the world and genius it must have contained ; what 
terrible symptoms of religious conflict, happily 
largely imaginary ; and what sickening manifesta- 
tions of the first conscious stirrings of a virgin heart : 
poses struck God knows for whom, myself or a dim 
posterity. If this is that diary, I thought, one swift 
glimpse will be enough, and it will straightway go 
into the flames, the flames that should have shrivelled 
its unwholesome body years ago. That at least, dear 
though the past may be and sweet the dreams of 
childhood, I do not wish to recover. Disgusting, 
morbid, hypocritical : all the apt adjectives rose to 
my tongue, all the more bitterly as that grim inner 
voice whispered, in its accustomed way, '* Why so 
venomous .'' Do you think you have really changed ? " 
But I took the plunge and encountered the shock. 
The book was completely empty. No mark, ex- 
cepting a faintly pencilled gd. inside the front cover, 
defaced its whiteness. Not artistic ambition, it seems, 
had prompted its preservation, and not sentiment. 
Only thrift. 



167 



SURNAMES 

IN spite of the paper shortage and a noticeable 
distraction that need not be specified, the learned 
still manage to continue their labours on certain 
elaborate standard works. Amongst these is Mr. 
Henry Harrison's " Surnames of the United King- 
dom : A Concise Etymological Dictionary," which 
has been coming out in parts for a very long time. A 
stranger opening it at the dictionary instalment 
would have something of a shock. For this first page 
contains consecutively series of entries like this : 

ECK(H)ART[(Ger.) Sword-Brave [O.H. Ger. 
ECKERT i ecka, weapon-point, sword -\- hart, 

hard, brave]. The A.- Sax. Ecgh{e)ard. 
EDELMANN (Ger.) Nobleman [O.H.Ger. edili, 

noble -|- t7ian{ri\. 
EDELSTEIN (Ger.) Precious Stone; Jewel 

[O.H.Ger. edili, noble -|- ^^^^^j stone]. 
EHRLICH (Ger.) Honourable [f-fO.H.Ger. era, 

honour -f- the adj. suflF. -Itch], 
EHRMANN (Ger.) Honourable Man ; Worthy 

[f. O.H.Ger. era, honour -^ man{n]. 
ELKAN (Heb.) an apocopated form of Elkanah 

(Vulgate ^/cflwa) = Possession of God, or 

Whom God hath Redeemed [Heb. Elqanah ; 

f. El, God, and qanah, to possess, redeem]. 
ENGEL (Ger.) i the first elem. of various compd. 

names (see following) : it is the sing, of the 

national name (O.E. Engle, Angles or English : 

see England in Diet.). 

1 68 



SURNAMES 

[The etym. is an O.Teut. word for * meadow,' 
' grassland,' seen in O.N, eng, M.Dut. engh, 
and O.L.Ger. and O.H.Ger. angar (mod. Ger. 
anger), in which last the -ar is really a pi. suff. 
corresp. to the O.N. pi. -tar, -jar (engiar, 
meadows) : -el is the dim. suff.]. 

2 Angel [see Angel in Diet.]. 

Should a copy fall into the hands of Mr. Billing he 
might hastily conclude that the situation was even 
worse than he had realised, and that the British race, 
with the exception of himself, had completely died 
out. Reference to the index explains this alarming 
sequence. The dictionary proper has already been 
completed, and the present instalment is part of an 
appendix covering the Principal Foreign Names 
found in British directories. No English names are 
given except a few in a list of " amendments and 
additions " at the end. 

The instalment, being foreign, is not so interest- 
ing to an Englishman as its predecessors. " Pinto," 
it appears, is Portuguese for " Chick," or " Chick- 
Hng " ; " Schenck " is German for " Wine and Spirit 
Retailer," and the entry of Schiller runs pathetically 
as follows : 

SCHILLER (Ger.) Squinter [for Ger. schieler, 
squinting person ; f. schel. M.H.Ger. schel (ch. 
O.H.Ger. scelah, awry, squint-eyed]. 

Many admirers of the German poet, how- 
ever, prefer to connect his name with Ger. 
Schiller, ' colour-play,' ' iridescence.' 

169 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

We are not all of us, however, philologists. Philology 
has got beyond the ordinary reader. In Dr. John- 
son's day one was still allowed to put up a little 
speculation of one's own without the slightest know- 
ledge of Celtic, M.H.Ger., or O.H.Ger. Nares, in 
his " Glossary," says that in the generation before 
his a commentator on the old word " gallimaufry " 
(hotch-potch) seriously suggested that it was originally 
a fry made for the maws of galley-slaves. When 
philology was at that stage of development the 
determination of name-origins would have made an 
agreeable round game. But we have got past this, 
and the experts alone are able to express an opinion. 
The ordinary reader will get entertainment only 
out of the selected results of research. 

In his Introduction, Mr. Harrison gives a variety 
of amusing detail. It is nothing new that Smith is 
the commonest English surname ; but there are 
some surprises amongst the next nineteen : Jones, 
Williams, Taylor, Davies, Brown, Thomas, Evans, 
Roberts, Johnson, Wilson, Robinson, Wright, Wood, 
Thompson, Hall, Green, Walker, Hughes, Edwards. 
The Welsh element is very noticeable ; the reason is 
that Wales is abnormally poor in surnames. Almost 
every Welshman derives his surname from a Chris- 
tian name, either via "Ap-" (Ap-Hugh = Pugh) or 
via the genitive (Hugh's [son] — Hughes). John, 
William, David, Evan, and Robert being the sur- 
names almost exclusively affected by the Welsh, the 
whole country is covered with Joneses, Williamses, 
etc. " In many a district WiUiamses, often not all 
related to one another, are ridiculously numerous, 
and various expedients have to be adopted whereby 

170 



SURNAMES 

to distinguish one family from another." It has 
therefore been suggested that the Joneses": and 
WilUamses should adopt new names which the State 
might authorise. It would not be a bad plan. A 
Llanelly or Neath football team must be the despair 
of the reporters who have to write sentences like 
" Danny Jones got the ball from the scrum, sent a 
long pass across to Dai Jones, who in his turn dis- 
posed of the leather to the red-headed Dai Jones. The 
latter sprinted along the touch-line, passed to Evan 
Jones, who kicked across, followed up well, his 
sprightly namesake reaching the corner before neatly 
tricking Dai Jones (Neath), and at the last moment 
sending John Jones (forward) in with a pretty try 
right behind the posts." 

It is in Wales that this paucity of surnames is 
most noticeable ; in England, however, it is striking 
in many rural localities. There are colonies of 
Hunkins in Cornwall, villages of Greens in East- 
AngHa, and Mr. Harrison records a bad Lancashire 
example from the district of Marshside, Southport, 
\\here the names of Wright, Ball, Sutton, and 
Rimmer have to do hard service. A supper was given 
to fishermen and boatmen. At this supper " no fewer 
than thirty-one men of the name Wright were 
present. Of these twelve bore the Christian name 
John ; five William ; four Thomas ; four Robert ; 
two Henry ; and two Richard ; and, in conse- 
quence, the above-named Wrights and others are 
distinguished in the newspaper report by the follow- 
ing nicknames in brackets after the name proper : 
Toff'y, Clogger, Wheel, Stem, Pluck, Diamond, 
Shrimp, Hutch, Cock, Sweet, Pantry, Few, Pen, 

171 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

Fash, Mike, Willox, Strodger, Daddy, Smiler, Nice, 
Jenny's, Manty, FuUsea, Music, Owd Ned, Margery, 
Buskin, Orchard, Siff, and Muff." In Scotland, 
" Smith " is very plentiful, being much the com- 
monest name in the Lowlands. Local peculiarities 
are very noticeable. In Inverness scarcely a Smith 
is to be found ; but one person in thirty-three is a 
Eraser, and one in forty- three a Macdonald. There 
is something to be said for clan names, however in- 
convenient ; but there can be no sentimental attach- 
ment to names which have originated as the Welsh 
names did, and much could be said in favour of a 
deliberate change in Wales. 

There is on record one example of a general 
deliberate adoption of surnames with the co-opera- 
tion of authority. In the eighteenth century millions 
of Jews in Central and Eastern Europe were com- 
pelled by their Teutonic governors to take sur- 
names. There was good administrative ground for 
the reform ; but instead of being allowed to choose 
their own names, the unfortunate Jews were com- 
pelled to take names given them by busy or cynical 
officials. Mr. Harrison tells a story of two Jews 
coming out of the police office : 

One of them had wisely released a little cash 
privately over the transaction, and had received 
a correspondingly respectable name — Weisheit 
(Wisdom). The other had to be more or less con- 
tent with Schweisshund (Bloodhound). " Why 
Schweisshund ? " said the first ; " hast thou not 
paid enough ? " " Gott mid die Welt ! " returned 
the second Israelite. " I gave half my fortune to 

172 



SURNAMES 

have the one letter ' w ' put in " — which meant, 
euphoniously speaking, that an attempt had been 
made, in the first place, to impose on the un- 
fortunate individual a German equivalent of 
" Dirty-dog." 

Other names recorded by Mr. Harrison as dating 
from this period of compulsion are Eselshaupt (Ass's- 
head), Kohlkopf (Cabbage-head, i.e., Block-head), 
Kanarienvogel (Canary-bird), Kanalgeruch (Canal- 
smell), Kiissemich (Kiss-me), Muttermilch (Mother's 
Milk), and Temperaturwechsel (Change of Tem- 
perature). He does not record the worst I have ever 
seen. It was referred to in a recent number of New 
Europe by a writer who was discussing Prussian 
brutalities in Poland. I have forgotten what the 
German word was ; but the English for it is " Ab- 
dominal Ulcer." " The Rise of the House of Ulcer ! " 
I doubt if any patronymic on record can equal that. 



173 



A TRANSLATOR OF GENIUS 

DURING the last few years those who 
watch the periodical Press may have noticed 
unobtrusively stealing forth batches of trans- 
lations from the Chinese by Mr. Arthur Waley. Mr. 
Waley is one of the most brilliant of our younger 
Orientalists. His original literary gifts are even rarer 
than his Chinese scholarship, and 170 " Chinese 
Poems " contains the first fruits of his poetic in- 
dustry. 

There is very little knowledge of Chinese litera- 
ture in this country. There is a good deal of mis- 
conception as to its nature. People think of the East 
comprehensively as a place very addicted to what 
Gibbon calls " the science — or, rather, the language 
— of Metaphysics." Translators foster the impres- 
sion — or, at least, do not lay themselves out to dis- 
sipate it. Thus, even a series which contains a good 
deal of very amusing matter (such as the sayings of 
Chuang Tzu) is portentously named " The Wisdom 
of the East " series ; and most of what little 
translation has been done from Chinese is, as a fact, 
concerned with Confucianism and Taoism. People 
who know about Mencius have never heard of the 
Tippling Scholar, the Drunken Dragon, or the 
Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove. Only, I think, 
Professor Giles, with his excellent " History of 
Chinese Literature " and his skilful volume of 
rhymed versions from the poets, has taken pains to 
show how little the Chinese have been concerned 
with isms. As Mr. Waley says, their " philosophic 

174 



A TRANSLATOR OF GENIUS 

literature knows no mean between the traditional- 
ism of Confucius and the nihilism of Chuang Tzu. 
In mind, as in body, the Chinese were for the most 
part torpid mainlanders. Their thoughts set out on 
no strange quests and adventures, just as their ships 
discovered no new continents." The glory of their 
literature is not their speculative work, but their 
lyric poetry. They do not write epics. They admire 
brevity, and if a poet cannot say what he wants in a 
hundred — or, better, in a dozen — lines, they think 
nothing of him. They have no Homer, Dante, Milton, 
or Shakespeare. But they have written at least as 
much great lyric poetry as any nation on earth, and 
the volume of their good lyric work is unparalleled 
in the West. 

The one thing the Western reader misses is 
development, conspicuous change. An unusually 
static — though a high — civilisation and fixed modes 
of thought have resulted in the subjects and even 
the forms of poetry remaining very much the same 
as they were before the great T'ang Age. There is 
no scholastic dictation as to what should be written 
about. The Chinese poets wrote about what they 
thought and felt. But those of one age thought and 
felt the same things as those of another : they lived 
the same lives in the same surroundings, with the 
same unaltering religions and scepticisms and the 
same tastes. They arrived early at what they con- 
sidered the perfect forms, the perfect arrangements 
of tones and rhymes, for short poems, and they have 
considered even slight variations very daring. Mr. 
Waley gives translations of what he calls the " Seven- 
teen Old Poems," which date from about the time 

175 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

of Christ. " These poems," he says, " had an 
enormous influence on all subsequent poetry, and 
many of the habitual cliches of Chinese verse are 
taken from them," I quote one (the translation, like 
all the others, should be read aloud) : 

Green, green. 

The grass by the river-bank. 

Thick, thick. 

The willow-trees in the garden. 

Sad, sad. 

The lady in the tower. 

White, white, 

Sitting at the casement window. 

Fair, fair. 

Her red-powdered face. 

Small, small, 

She puts out her pale hand. 

Once she was a dancing-house girl, 

Now she is a wandering man's wife. 

The wandering man went, but did not return; 

It is hard alone to keep an empty bed. 

To the reader of translations this might be of any 
period ; subject, details, words, turn up again and 
again for centuries. But, in spite of all their spiritual 
and technical limitations, the Chinese poets achieve 
a prodigious amount of variety, all the more wonder- 
ful because of the narrow field in which they work. 
When a good poet is moved to write of the thousand- 
times-written-about subject of home-sickness or 
the deserted maiden it is a new thing that he makes, 
a new beauty of an old kind. 

176 



A TRANSLATOR OF GENIUS 

Mr. Waley's translations cover a large field ; he 
gives specimens of poets living as far apart as the 
fourth century B.C. and the seventeenth of our era. 
He ignores Li Po, who in the West and in modern 
China has been regarded as the greatest of all, and 
takes for his central figure Po-Chu'i, who, he thinks, 
is inadequately appreciated. Po (ninth century) 
was, like many great Chinese writers, a provincial 
governor. Instead of copying out his biography, I 
may usefully busy myself with giving a few of his 
poems. The first is a poem rejoicing at the arrival 
of a bosom friend : 

When the yellow bird's note was almost stopped ; 
And half-formed the green plum's fruit ; 
Sitting and grieving that spring things were over, 
I rose and entered the Eastern garden's gate. 
I carried my cup, and was dully drinking alone : 
Suddenly I heard a knocking sound at the door. 
Dwelling secluded, I was glad that some one had 

come ; 
How much the more, when I saw it was Ch'en 

Hsuing ! 
At ease and leisure, — all day we talked ; 
Crowding and jostling,— the feelings of many 

years. 
How great a thing is a single cup of wine ! 
For it makes us tell the story of our whole lives. 

The next is satirical : 

Sent as a present from Annam — 
A red cockatoo. 

Coloured like the peach-blossom, 
Speaking with the speech of men. 

177 N 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

ft 

And they did to it what is always done 
To the learned and eloquent. 
They took a cage with stout bars, 
And shut it up inside. 

The next is a lament for his little daughter, Golden 
Bells, who died : 

Ruined and ill — a man of two score ; 

Pretty and guileless,— a girl of three. 

Not a boy, — but, still, better than nothing : 

To soothe one's feeling, — from time to time a kiss ! 

There came a day, — they suddenly took her from 

me ; 
Her soul's shadow wandered I know not where. 
And when I remember how just at the time she 

died 
She lisped strange sounds, beginning to learn to 

talk, 
Then I know that the ties of flesh and blood 
Only bind us to a load of grief and sorrow. 
At last, by thinking of the time before she was born, 
By thought and reason I drove the pain away. 
Since my heart forgot her, many days have passed. 
And three times winter has changed to spring. 
This morning, for a little, the old grief came back, 
Because, in the road, I met her foster-nurse. 

Some of his longest poems are his best ; but I have 
room here only for two more short ones. The first 
is on " The Hat given to the Poet by Li Chien " ; 
the second was written after retirement, and is called 
" Ease " : 

178 



A TRANSLATOR OF GENIUS 

Long ago, to a white-haired gentleman 
You made the present of a black gauze hat. 
The gauze hat still sits on my head ; 
But you already are gone to the Nether Springs. 
The thing is old, but still fit to wear ; 
The man is gone, and will never be seen again. 
Out on the hill the moon is shining to-night, 
And the trees on your tomb are swayed by the 
autumn wind. 



Lined coat, warm cap, and easy felt slippers, 
In the little tower, at the low window, sitting over 

the sunken brazier. 
Body at rest, heart at peace ; no need to rise early, 
I wonder if the courtiers at the Western capital 

know of these things or not } 

Mr. Waley's translations appear to me as good as 
translations can be. He was right in avoiding rhyme, 
as there was no hope of reproducing the intricate 
rhyme-schemes of the originals without gross con- 
tortions. His wavelike unrhymed lines have a beauty 
of their own, and, although the extreme economy 
of Chinese writing cannot be fully reproduced, his 
versions are wonderfully terse, exact, and concrete 
in their imagery. His book, which I hope will be the 
first of a series, will not only increase English under- 
standing of China, but is a gain to our own literature. 



179 



AUTHORS' RELICS 

ALL civilisations have cherished relics. There 
is nothing wrong in that. The superficially 
logical may put up a case against it, but the 
student of reality will think it right that men should 
thus express their proper affections and useful that 
they should thus minister to the sense of tradition. 
I think, however, that the passion for relics may be 
carried too far. Some things are more significant 
than others, and a few things suffice. Shakespeare's 
fine-tooth comb would not greatly appeal to me 
except as a specimen of Tudor workmanship, and 
when we come to the combs of persons vastly in- 
ferior to Shakespeare I feel moved to protest. 

The occasion of these remarks is the issue of a 
catalogue of the Samuel Butler collection preserved 
in St. John's College, Cambridge. Butler was an 
eminent, if perverse and eccentric, man. He was 
educated (as I happen to have been myself) at a 
college which produced Wordsworth, Herrick, Prior, 
Sir Thomas Wyat, Greene, Southampton, Burghley, 
Strafford, Falkland, Palmerston, and divers others. 
Owing to Mr. Festing Jones's enthusiasm the 
college has converted an old cloak-room into a 
Butler museum ; and the contents of this are now 
displayed before us. The collection at St. John's is 
certainly extraordinarily comprehensive. Butler's 
" Life " was remarkable as being more detailed, 
almost, than any " Life " that ever was written. Mr. 
Jones not merely let one into the most intimate and 
the most commonplace records of the Sage's daily 

i8o 



AUTHORS' RELICS 

life, but he went so far as to give us precise and 
detailed statements of the contents of the various 
sizes of portmanteaux that Butler took away with 
him {a) for a week-end, {b) for a visit to Shropshire, 
and {c) for a trip to the Continent. The clothes, the 
hair-brushes, the tooth-brushes, and even the tonics 
and digestive pills were all solemnly catalogued and 
enumerated. The collection at St. John's is similarly 
exhaustive. 

There is no Wordsworth collection at St. John's, 
though the famous Pickersgill portrait of the poet 
sitting (with a red nose) on a rock and watching a 
pastoral landscape, hangs in the hall, and under- 
graduates every night swig their beer under it. 
There is no Herrick collection : it would be difficult 
to form one : when you have the first edition of 
the " Hesperides " you have pretty well everything 
that is to be got. No room is set apart for Matthew 
Prior, the largest paper copy of whose 171 8 collected 
edition is in itself sufficiently bulky to fill a small 
room. But Butler had a faithful disciple. Butler was 
preserved. Butler is to be immortalised. And the 
relics of Butler which have been deposited at St. 
John's beat for variety and number any such accumu- 
lation of mementoes to be found in the world, even 
at Stratford. 

We start with pictures, sketches and drawings by 
or relating to Samuel Butler. Butler was a dabbler 
in painting as in every other art : his picture of 
" Heatherley's Studio " hangs in the Tate, and is 
well worthy of place there or in any other public 
gallery. He did a great number of pictures, studies 
and sketches. When he died some were given to 

i8i 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

elementary schools, some to the British Museum, 
and some to his friends, amongst whom ranked 
Alfred Cathie, his astonishing man-servant. Mr. 
Jones's and Alfred's have gone to St. John's, as also 
many of Butler's snap-shots and his " camera lucida," 
which he hoped at one time would do half his sketch- 
ing work for him. The paintings at St. John's are 
none of them equal to the fine picture at the Tate : 
they are mostly daubs of Italian scenes, many of 
them suitable for illustrations to Butler's work on 
the " Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont." Next we 
come to books and music written by Butler, from 
an article in the college magazine for the Lent term 
of 1858 to the 1920 French translation of " Ere- 
whon," and including the interesting MS. of his 
notebooks ; these are rounded off thoroughly with 
Mr. Festing Jones's " Life," of which the college 
possesses the first, second and third manuscripts, 
the proofs, the revises, the advance copy and every- 
thing else. Next come books and articles about Butler, 
and then books which belonged to Butler : who had, 
as he said, " the smallest library of any man in 
London who is by way of being literary." Butler's 
Bible, given to him by his godmother, appears here, 
and (delicious thing) the " Life of Dr. Arnold," 
which Butler bought when he was writing his " Life" 
of his grandfather " because he was told that it was 
a model biography of a great schoolmaster." Descend- 
ing the scale we come to Butler's maps, including 
various reduced ordnance maps of parts of England : 
that of the South Environs of London is inscribed 
" S. Butler, 15, CUfford's Tnn, Fleet Street, London, 
E.G. Please return to the above address. The finder, 

182 



AUTHORS' RELICS 

if poor, will be rewarded ; if rich, thanked." Butler's 
Music collection was, as one would have expected, 
composed almost entirely of works by Handel : the 
" Miscellaneous papers " are more varied. They 
include the collection of testimonials which Butler 
submitted when, in 1886, he was candidate for the 
Slade Professorship of Fine Art at Cambridge, 
various comic newspaper cuttings kept by Butler, a 
collection of obituary notices of Butler, and the 
" Menu of Dinner given to Henry Resting Jones on 
the completion of the ' Memoir.' " Here we are 
distinctly coming down to details. .\nd after going 
through various boxes of photographic negatives 
and a collection of photographs of Butler's family 
and friends, we come to " Effects : Formerly the 
Personal Property of Samuel Butler." Here are 
some of these effects : 

One mahogany table with two flaps. 

Butler used this table for his meals, for his 

writing, and for all purposes to which a table 

can be put. 
Sandwich case. 

This he took with him on his Sunday walks 

and sketching excursions. 
Passport. 

Pocket magnifying glass. 
Address book. 
Homeopathic medicine case. 

He always took this with him on his travels. 
Two pen trays. 

One tin water-bottle for sketching. 
One sloping desk. 

183 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

One pair of chamois horns given to him by 
Dionigri Negri at Varallo Sesia. 

One handle and webbing in which he carried 
his books to and from the British Museum. 

One bust of Handel. 

Bag for pennies. 

Two small Dutch dolls. 

A brass bowl my brother Edward brought from 
India. 

The matchbox which Alfred gave to Butler. 

It is pretty thorough. I miss Butler's pyjamas, which 
are totally unrepresented ; and no collection of the 
kind can be deemed quite complete without some 
sample nail-parings, some boots, a piece of toast 
incised by the hero's teeth, and some few studs. 
There is not even a lock of Butler's hair here. Never- 
theless, as I said, it is as varied a collection of the 
kind as exists. And it is strange that all these reUcs 
should have reverently been brought together, placed 
in a Cambridge college, and dedicated to the memory 
of one who spent his whole life attempting to reason 
people out of what he considered their absurd senti- 
mentalism. On Butler's own principles his reUcs 
should have been buried with him. But disciples will 
be disciples, and his disciples were wiser than he. 



184 



THE LIBRARIAN'S HARD LOT 

IT is commonly assumed that the chief Librarian 
of a place like the Bodleian or the British Museum 
has nothing whatever to do. He has gone through 
his period of storm and stress. He has catalogued ; 
he has sorted out the new accessions ; he has fetched 
and carried for readers ; but at last he has been (as 
men in so many spheres are reputed to be) promoted 
beyond the dust and trampling, into a region like 
that of the lotos-eaters where no labour is demanded 
and the fat fruits of the salary tree drop ripe into the 
lazily opened mouth. This prevalent misconception 
has at last stirred Bodley's Librarian to indignation. 
In the current number of the " Bodleian Quarterly 
Record " there is an account of what all Bodley's 
servants, from highest to lowest, have to do ; and 
the list of duties is so terrifying that I feel, to use 
Sir Andrew Aguecheek's terminology, that I had 
as lief be a Puritan as a librarian. 

There is plenty of work for the Chief's assistants. 
The Sub- Librarians are compiUng a " Summary 
Catalogue of Western MSS.," begun in 1890 ; some 
of the manuscripts are still to be found described 
only in a catalogue, which may be reasonably con- 
sidered out of date, printed in 1697. Assistants are 
on the spot at nine in the morning (when you, reader, 
are having your tea and biscuits in bed) sorting out 
the books and letters, entering the acquisitions in a 
numerical register, examining booksellers' catalogues. 
What time the Chief Librarian arrives is not stated , 
but he has so much to do that 5 a.m. by the early 

185 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

workmen's tram should about meet the case. Here 
is a summary of some of the complex of calls that 
are made on him : 

Bodley's Librarian takes charge of the entire 
internal administration of the Library. He assigns 
duties to the staff, undertakes the more important 
part of his official correspondence, signs all orders 
and acknowledgments of donations and copy- 
right accessions, decides on the purchase of MSS. 
and printed books, deals with suggestions of readers, 
settles questions touching repairs, accommo- 
dation for readers, furniture, boilers, fuel, lava- 
tories, and all such domestic matters. He is also 
much concerned with accounts, in which he is 
assisted by a special Assistant. The financial con- 
dition of the Library is always precarious (" annual 
income twenty pounds, annual expenditure 
twenty pounds ought and six."). Fortunately 
things do occasionally " turn up," and for a time 
the Library rises superior to its difficulties. The 
Librarian confers daily with the staff about their 
duties, and he is readily accessible to those of the 
Junior Staff who wish to consult him about their 
future. His reputation as an Orientalist brings 
inquiries from all parts of the world, not only 
about his own special languages — Hebrew, 
Samaritan, Arabic, and Hittite — but concerning 
all the other Eastern languages, those of the Turks, 
Persians, Abyssinians, and, for aught I know, of 
the peoples who dwell in Bacharia, Moretane, 
Abchaz, " and the Isle of Pentexoire, that is the 
land of Prester John." The Librarian is also 

i86 



THE LIBRARIAN'S HARD LOT 

compiling a Catalogue of the Collection of Hebrew 
books, which is probably the finest in the world. 
For this undertaking his axiom is, " Nulla dies 
sine linea." At the moment the most perplexing 
problem with which he has to deal is the finding 
of shelf-room in the Bodleian Building for acces- 
sions of older works and special collections such 
as the Backhouse Chinese Collection, and in this 
connexion it must be remembered that there are 
special difficulties {e.g., in securing adequate 
lighting, strength of floors, etc.) in adapting an 
old building to modern needs. 

But this does not finish it, for there is the corre- 
spondence. 

The correspondence is opened by the Librarian. 
That is to say such of it as reaches him. It is con- 
ceivable that some of it never does. For what does is 
inscribed to such a variety of erroneous addresses 
that it cannot but be supposed that there are many 
letters which completely beat even our ingenious 
Post Office. That intelligent department has duly 
delivered to the Bodleian letters addressed to *' The 
Hon. Chairman of the Greek Library," *' Signor 
Library of College and University," " The Directory 
of the Collection of Holly Bibles," " The Library, 
College, Oxford," and the name of the institution 
has appeared as Blodeian, Bodeia, Bodderian, Bodlei 
Ave, Mogleyan, Bodiliean, Bodleland, Bodbian, 
Bookian, BibHotheque Boddeienne, Bibliotheque 
Bodleisse, and Rodleian Library, Sheffield Oxford. 
It may be imagined that correspondents who show 
such eccentricity in their addresses write letters 

187 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

which are equally original and sometimes equally 
puzzling. There are, of course, perfectly sensible 
enquiries (in stacks) about books and MSS. in the 
library, applications to take photographs, to ex- 
change literature, to read on the premises. But there 
are others less straightforward. Many people (who 
usually say they are " fond of books ") write for 
jobs ; many (who have been known to describe 
their wares by giving their weights in lbs. and ozs.) 
wish to sell old books, usually worthless ; and many 
ask questions. Here are some of the questions and 
demands which have recently come to this hard- 
worked gentleman who has such a mass of work to 
do, let alone looking after the coals and the lavatories : 

Did Wesley ever meet or converse with William 
Pitt during the time that Wesley was Fellow of 
Lincoln ? 

[To settle a golfing bet] which of the following 
is correct, " If a match fails to keep its place on 
the green " or " If a match fail to keep its place 
on the green " ? 

Is the acacia tree in my garden the first one 
planted in England ? 

I beg of you to send me the complete catalogues 
of your libraries, publications, etc. Kindly ask 
all the bibliographical, catalogue, Directory and 
reference book publishers of Britain and Europe 
to send me their complete catalogues. You may 
please circulate this P.C. among the librarians 
and Chancellors of all the British Universities 
for attention. Please ask all the chief Hbrarians of 



THE LIBRARIAN'S HARD LOT 

all the European libraries to do the same for me. 
Kindly name and ask all the oriental publishers 
and oriental institutes of Britain and Europe to 
send me their catalogues and journals. An early 
compliance. 

On top of this a hundred thousand readers a year 
enter the Library, and continual rearrangement is 
necessary, which means at present the regrouping 
of about an eighth of a million books per annum. 
" For the successful shifting, incorporation and 
allocation of room for growth of large sections of 
books," says the Librarian plaintively, " a consider- 
able capacity for organisation is essential ; muscle 
is also desirable." This work of porterage, at least, 
the Librarian does not do himself. 

I shall never again regard the Bodleian as a home 
of rest. I am not an Oxford man, but I have often 
passed those mouldering heads of the Caesars and 
walked into the ancient quadrangle of the Bodleian 
thinking it the quietest place in the world. The green 
turf, the crumbling stone walls, the little old door- 
ways, the ancient lettering : I have stood there, 
with none but myself looking, and ruminated that 
here above all one had found a " haunt of ancient 
peace." It has seemed that inside (I have never been 
inside) there could be nothing but ancient medical 
and theological treatises, huge Bibles chained to 
desks, crabbed manuscripts of antique scholarship, 
and drowsy spectacled old men keeping what only 
courtesy could call a watch over them, I How false 
a vision ! No beehive is the scene of more frenzied 
industry ; no council table, no Stock Exchange, 

189 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

beholds more frantic readings of hair, more heart- 
burnings, more bewilderment, more chafing at the 
maddening stupidity of things and men. Even at this 
moment Bodley's Librarian is probably sitting there 
trying to answer some ridiculous question about 
Napoleon or miserably writing to inform some 
illiterate Baboo that he cannot be made Keeper of 
English Verse, whilst his brain reels at the thunder 
of the multitudes of thronging readers and the trucks 
conveying books from one unknown destination to 
another. I at least will never do a great librarian an 
injustice again. 



190 



DISRAELI'S WIT 

I AM one of those who like calendars containing 
brief pieces of "wit and wisdom culled" from 
eminent writers : though nothing is more horrible 
than a collection of such cullings from a writer who 
is not good enough. I opened, therefore, with some 
curiosity " The DisraeH Calendar," put together 
by Mrs. Henry Head, who has demonstrated her 
gifts as a selector before this. I was not sure that I 
should like so much Disraeli in brief bits : it might 
be thin. But my fears were ungrounded, and the 
book should do something to assist that recovery of 
Disraeli's reputation as a writer which began when 
the first volume of the Moneypenny biography re- 
called attention to him. 

The volume contains extracts from his letters 
and a fair number of passages illustrating his habitual 
manner of thought and his occasional genuine moods. 
There is a touch of sincerity about the romantic 
view of the Tory Party on the first page. We can 
hear Disraeli thinking in this passage from " Endy- 
mion " : " Great men should think of Opportunity, 
and not of Time. Time is the excuse of feeble and 
puzzled spirits. They make Time the sleeping 
partner of their lives to accomplish what ought to 
be achieved by their own will. . . . Power, and 
power alone, should be your absorbing object, and 
all the accidents and incidents of life should only be 
considered with reference to that main result." We 
have here the ambitious Disraeli's declaration that 
" the time will come," and the reflective Disraeli 

191 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

in the bitter passage on Progress which ends with 
the Inge-like remark that " the European talks of 
progress, because, by an ingenious application of 
some scientific arguments, he has established a 
society which has mistaken comfort for civilisation." 
We do not get here — I don't think we get an5^where 
— anything like the whole Disraeli : but we are 
given illustrations of all those aspects which he 
showed the world. 

But the compiler of this Calendar, having as her 
prime object the production of an amusing book, 
has not confined herself, or even devoted her main 
attention, to extracts which illustrate the various 
sides of Dizzy's character, his political thought, or 
his power as a novelist ; half her quotations are 
squibs and mots. They are often very good, always 
tersely expressed, and anyone who examines the 
following specimens will, I think, easily identify 
the type to which they belong : 

Lord and Lady Mountjoy, . . . unfortunate 
people, who with a large fortune, lived in a wrong 
square, and asked to their house everybody who 
was nobody. 

" Does your Highness take snuff ? " " Thank 
you, no ; I've left off snuff ever since I passed a 
winter at Baffin's Bay. You've no idea how very 
awkward an accidental sneeze is near the pole." 

"It is very immoral, and very unfair," said 
Lord Milford, " that any man should marry for 
tin who does not want it." 

" They say primroses make a capital salad," 
said Lord St. Jerome. 

192 



DISRAELFS WIT 

Time has brought us substitutes, but how in- 
ferior ! Man has deified corn and wine ! but not 
even the Chinese or the Irish have raised temples 
to tea and potatoes. 

How those rooks bore ! I hate staying with 
ancient famihes, you're always cawed to death. 

Her features were like those conceptions of 
Grecian sculpture which, in moments of despond- 
ency, we sometimes believe to be ideal. 

I hate a straightforward fellow. As Pinto says, 
if every man were straightforward in his opinion, 
there would be no conversation. 

A coquette is a being who wishes to please. 
Alas ! coquettes are too rare. 'Tis a career that 
requires great abiHties, infinite pains, a gay and 
airy spirit. ... A charming character at all times; 
in a country-house an invaluable one. 

" Well, I always have had a prejudice against 
Pontius Pilate," said Lord Cadurcis. 

Nothing is more undignified than to make a 
speech. . . . Every charlatan is an orator, and 
almost every orator is a charlatan. 

I declare when I was eating that truffle, I felt a 
glow about my heart that, if it were not indigestion, 
I think must have been gratitude. 

What do these accents recall ? or, rather, what did 
they anticipate ? Is there anything closer in English 
to the manner of Oscar Wilde ? 

It is not merely that there is a resemblance be- 
tween the expression of the two men, between the 

193 O 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

shapes of those brief and antithetical epigrams, those 
sentences with smirking parentheses or surprising 
ends. Their very material is largely the same. The 
Dizzy calendar is as full of puns as the Oscar Wilde 
calendar : each found his principal materials in the 
world of the diner-out, and each exploited to the 
full the possibilities of the obvious and unusual 
truth, and of the obvious and unusual falsehood. 
At their best no two epigrammatists more closely 
resemble each other ; and though the comparison 
should not be pressed too far, the similitude does 
not fade away when one gets beyond the mot. In 
Disraeli sentence often flows into sentence in what 
we have become accustomed to think the typical 
Wildean way. " The world admired him, and called 
him Charley, from which it will be inferred that he 
was a privileged person, and was applauded for a 
thousand actions, which in anyone else would have 
met with decided reprobation." It is the familiar 
manner : and part of the effect of the sentence 
springs from the fact that, somehow, it is odd to 
hear a word like " Charley " on the lips of the 
highly-conscious dandy DisraeU, a sort of oddity 
of which Wilde was well aware and which he often 
exploited. But one can quote other passages in which 
the material used was material never used by any- 
one but Disraeli before Wilde, though Wilde made 
it fashionable in the 'nineties. Take this : ** I have a 
passion for living in the air," said Herbert ; "I 
always envied the shepherds in * Don Quixote.* 
One of my youthful dreams was living among 
mountains of rosemary, and drinking only goat's 
milk. After breakfast I will read you Don Quixote's 

194 



DISRAELFS WIT 

description of the golden age. I have often read it 
until the tears came into my eyes " : it is simply 
one of Wilde's Cyrils or Eustaces speaking ; we can 
hardly believe it. Or take the mock-serious, hyper- 
sensitive aestheticism of this : " Mr. Phcebus one 
morning opened a chest in his cabin and produced 
several velvet bags, one full of pearls, another rubies, 
another Venetian sequins, Napoleons and golden 
piastres. * I Uke to look at them,' said Mr. Phoebus, 
' and find life more intense when they are about my 
person. But bank notes, so cold and thin, they give 
me an ague.' " 

I hasten to add that there is a point at which the 
resemblance ceases. Dizzy had great powers as a 
novelist : such things as the descriptions of " low 
life " in " Sybil " were beyond Wilde's range, though 
not beyond his appreciation, and he would be an 
audacious critic who should maintain that Wilde, 
born under a luckier star, might have become Prime 
Minister and an idol of the Conservative Party. 
And, as the close, I remember that he was antici- 
pated at least once elsewhere, in the works of the 
almost universal Dickens. People often discuss 
whether Mr. Harold Skimpole's character resembled 
Leigh Hunt's ; they have not, I think, noticed that 
his conversation was exceedingly like Wilde's. Turn 
to his conversations, and especially to that in which 
he drew the attention of the bailiffs to the beauties 
of Nature, and you will see what I mean. 



195 



AN EDIFYING CLASSIC 

I HAVE — if I may be permitted so personal a 
confession, on account of its relevance — a num- 
ber of small sons. Like other fathers I have to 
get them books. It goes to the heart of a professional 
reviewer to buy any book whatever : one feels about 
such purchases as a dramatic critic must feel when 
circumstances compel him to fork out ten and six- 
pence (plus tax) for a stall. But I do not receive 
children's books from editors, and their authors, 
whom I do not commonly know, never send me 
presentation copies of them. Every Christmas, there- 
fore, and on various natal days sprinkled over the 
year, I sally out to explore the bookshops for all the 
world as though I were an ordinary member of the 
purchasing public. I am seldom entirely pleased 
with the books I buy. I will not say that my children 
are not, for their tastes seem to be remarkably in- 
discriminate. But I have fancied (and how can it be 
otherwise where children have such obviously ex- 
ceptional natural gifts) that on the whole the better 
kinds of books have pleased them best : that " The 
Jungle Book " and " Alice in Wonderland " have 
been a more permanent delight to them than 
" Toddles at the Seaside " and " Florrie's Baa- 
Lamb." I, therefore, went out this Christmas deter- 
mined not to buy any of the ephemeral modern 
rubbish which is written for children by half-wits 
who succeed in getting other half-wits to collaborate 
with illustrations, but to add to the number of those 
standard works which never lose their attraction. I 
will, I said, get a children's classic. 

196 



AN EDIFYING CLASSIC 

What shall it be, I wondered ? There is " ^i^sop " : 
they have it. There are Grimm and Andersen, but 
they have those. The expurgated " Gulliver's 
Travels " is not unknown to them ; they know all 
about Robin Hood, King Arthur, and Crusoe ; they 
at present disUke the " Arabian Nights," and I'm 
hanged if I'm going to give them " Uncle Tom's 
Cabin." As I walked to the station my thoughts 
travelled back to a distant, vivid, but almost unreal 
past, in which I saw a small boy curled up in an 
armchair reading. What was it he read with most 
zest ? It came to me in a flash. I hadn't heard the 
book mentioned for years. It was " The Swiss Family 
Robinson." Why, of course, that of all books was 
the book ; I would get it. And I would read it again 
myself, I would recover the old excitement over 
that battle with the snake ; I would refresh my 
memory as to the habits of the armadillo and the 
duck-billed platypus ; and, above all, I should see 
that picture of the house in the tree which was the 
basis of the earliest of my ambitions, and (alas !) 
the least likely to be fulfilled, unlikely though all 
the others may be. At the end of a day, however, I 
had learned that it is one thing to want to buy " The 
Swiss Family Robinson " and another to get it. I 
went to shop after shop, and the booksellers looked 
at me as though I were asking them for a plesiosaurus 
or a mastodon. They had no copies of it ; they held 
out little hope of obtaining a copy. I tried the second- 
hand booksellers. Their tune was quite different. 
They often had copies, but these were always 
snapped up at once. In the end I persuaded a scep- 
tical bookseller that the book must be obtainable, 

197 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

and that it was his duty as an honourable tradesman 
to obtain it for me instead of trying to induce me 
to buy the latest specimen of Mr. Arthur Rackham's 
beautiful art. Now, a fortnight after Christmas, it 
has arrived. I have been reading it. 

There is no picture of the house in the tree. But 
the rest is all there : the incredibly simple style, the 
pious family, the industry, the remarkable congeries 
of animals, the woodcuts, the harpooned walrus, 
the " trusty double-barrels," the thousand exciting 
encounters, and above all the episode of the enormous 
boa-constrictor : 

Fritz remained by me while I examined the 
object through my spy-glass. 

" It is, as I feared, an enormous serpent ! " 
cried I, "it advances directly this way, and we 
shall be placed in the greatest possible danger, 
for it will cross the bridge to a certainty." 

" May we not attack it, father ? " exclaimed the 
brave boy. 

" Only with the greatest caution," returned I, 
" it is far too formidable, and too tenacious of life, 
for us rashly to attempt its destruction. . . . 

" Only see," I replied, " how the monster 
deals with his victim [the donkey] ; closer and 
more tightly he curls his crushing folds, the bones 
give way, he is kneading him into a shapeless 
mass. He will soon begin to gorge his prey, and 
slowly but surely it will disappear down that dis- 
tended maw !"...! expected that the boa, 
before swallowing its prey, would cover it with 

198 



AN EDIFYING CLASSIC 

saliva, to aid in the operation, although it struck 
me that its very slender forked tongue was about 
the worst possible implement for such a purpose. 

It was evident to us, however, that this popular 
idea was erroneous. 

The act of lubricating the mass must have taken 
place during the process of swallowing : certainly 
nothing was applied beforehand. 

This wonderful performance lasted from seven 
in the morning until noon. 

Was there ever anything like it ? 

It is a superb book. It is easy to make fun of 
it. Everybody when he remembers it remembers it 
with a smile ; but it is usually a smile of affection. 
The style, as I have remarked, is the greatest ex- 
ample of naive pomposity which we possess. The 
improbabilities (over and above the great obvious 
improbability of every kind of bird and beast in the 
Zoo being concentrated on a single island) follow 
each other without a break, and no edifying story- 
teller on record ever pumped out his edification with 
so little attempt at concealment. Here is no educa- 
tion in parenthesis and no moralising by implica- 
tion : the morals are expounded in sermons, and 
the facts, mainly zoological, are handed out in 
large wads, accompanied by frankly informative 
illustrations. By all the rules of story- telling, as 
expounded by critics and observed by conscious 
artists, this book was bound to fail ; the most 
innocent child must inevitably be bored by it. But 
the point is that it didn't fail. I do not think that I 
was more addicted to sermons than any other child 

199 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

or less fond of being educated ; but I do clearly 
remember that I was thrilled by this story, and that 
the irrelevant details here never struck me as irrele- 
vant. It seemed the most natural thing in the world 
for the author, when mentioning an ant-eater, to 
digress in order to tell all about ant-eaters ; and I 
happened to be interested in ant-eaters. With the 
exception of " The Pilgrim's Progress " (which is 
on a much higher literary plane), I do not remember 
any book in which so large a didactic element is so 
successfully conveyed in a story. And the author 
managed it because he was a man of extraordinary 
simplicity, sweetness, goodness, and curiosity, a 
man with much of the child in him, who went 
straight ahead as he felt inclined, and never thought 
at all of himself or of art. The author, I say. But 
who was he ? This is a classic beyond all dispute. On 
the title page of this book appear no names but 
those of the editor (the late W. H. G. Kingston) 
and a horde of ancient and modern illustrators, of 
whom the ancient are the better. Either the editor 
did not know the author's name, or else he simply 
forgot all about him, automatically regarding the 
book (but few of the greatest books are looked at in 
this way) as something impersonal and established, 
like Stonehenge or a phenomenon of Nature. Wasn't 
he a pastor } Wasn't his name, miistiit it have been, 
MuUer or Schmidt ? I don't know. I am away from 
home. The only work of reference within my reach 
is Colonel John Buchan's " History of the War," 
and I have searched the index of that in vain. 



200 



CHRISTMAS CARDS 

I DO not receive many Christmas cards. This is 
not surprising as I never remember to send any 
out. The most I have ever done, when feehng 
most strenuous, was to scramble out a few New 
Year's cards to people who had sent me Christmas 
cards, and whose remembrance of me stirred my 
gratitude. But I do always get some, and I got a few 
this year. 

I have just been looking at them all before cremat- 
ing them. Those which come from the more intel- 
lectual of my friends have no longer anything 
peculiarly Christmas cardy about them. They are in 
good taste, designed by or for the senders, admir- 
ably printed, and, in point of language, ready for 
the scrutiny of the most fastidious critic of style. 
Nothing could be more refined. There are no sprigs 
of holly on these, no clas pings of amputated hands, 
no squat village towers amid snowy landscapes. 
They have brown collotype pictures of the owners' 
houses, choice etchings after Rembrandt, or ex- 
quisite coloured reproductions of St. Vincent 
and a Donor by Melozzo da Forli in the Palazzo 
Doria-Pamphili at Rome. Each card of them is a 
silent protest against the old kind of card. As I look 
at them I hear them saying, " What an improvement 
we are ! How clearly we demonstrate that Christ- 
mas greetings can be conveyed without vulgarity. 
What careful consideration we betray ! The men 
and women who chose us really wished to send their 
friends something worth having." There is a beautiful 

20I 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

woodcut on yellowish hand-made paper, with 
" A Happy Christmas " as only inscription. There 
is a page from an illuminated manuscript. There is 
a card especially written out by an expert calligrapher. 
There is another displaying choice specimens of 
seventeenth-century typographical ornament. All 
very chaste, and not one of them (I need scarcely 
say) bearing a line of verse, even of good verse. 

Yet from the more old-fashioned and less aspiring 
remnant of my acquaintance there still come a few 
tokens of -the old Victorian sorts, freely powdered 
with Robin Redbreasts and mistletoe, and carrying 
quatrains to a card. It was one of these quatrains 
that checked me in the middle of my campaign of 
destruction and made me begin these reflections. It 
runs as follows : 

Glad Christmas to you on this day. 

Good Fortune ever find you. 
Life's Sunlight be before you aye, 

Its shadows all behind you. 

Well, you will say, there is nothing very odd about 
that : it is precisely like thousands of others. Wait 
a moment. The odd thing is that under those verses 
is printed the name " Browning." 

I stand open to correction. I have, I admit, not 
searched Robert Browning's works for this sequence 
of elegant sentiments. But I really cannot suppose 
that he wrote it. Nor can I believe that his wife wrote 
it. Nor can I even believe that Mr. Oscar Browning 
wrote it, and with him is exhausted the catalogue of 
the Brownings known to fame or me. There have 

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CHRISTMAS CARDS 

been, no doubt, other Brownings. John Browning 
or Nicodemus Browning may have been the author 
of this composition ; or George Bernard Browning, 
or J. Pierpont Browning, or some inglorious but not 
altogether mute Ella Wheeler Browning. But if 
Robert Browning was really the author he must 
certainly have had a bad off day, on which his style 
was indistinguishable from that of any other Christ- 
mas card poet. And the common style of the 
Christmas card poets reaches the lowest known or 
conceivable level of banality in conception and 
tameness in execution. 

I look through some of the other missives which 
have been sent to me in the hope (I must presume) 
of cheering me up, of inducing merriment and an 
optimistic outlook. Here are some of the verses on 
them — if I am committing breaches of copyright I 
must apologise : 

(I) 
To you and those within your home 

This Christmas day may blessings come, 

And may good luck, good health, good cheer 

Be guests of yours for all the year. 

As on Life's tide the seasons come and go 
May sorrow ebb and gladness ever flow. 

Milestones of olden memories, 
Along sweet friendship's way ; 

Oh ! how they brighten up the past, 
And cheer the coming day. 

203 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

(4) . 

Greeting just to say we all unite, 
In wishing you and yours a Christmas bright. 

Deck out the walls with garlands gay, 
And let the kindly laughter play. 
List ! the chimes are sweetly sounding 
Xmas happiness abounding : 
All that's good and true be thine 
At this merry festive time. 

(6) 
This is the time for sweet remembrance, 

For thoughts of friends both old and new ; 
The words will not express the wishes 

Sent within this card for you. 

If Browning wrote one of them why not the lot ? 
There is, I admit, a touch of Mrs. Browning about 
the rhyme of " time " and " thine " in number five, 
and the elaborate maritime image in number two 
has perhaps a touch of Swinburne. But except for 
these very slight local differences the whole of these, 
not to mention thousands of others, all that you 
have ever seen and all that your Aunt Maria has 
ever seen, might have come from one pen. It is 
amazing that every publisher of Christmas cards 
should have " on tap " a bard so skilful that he can 
turn out hundreds of these poems without ever in- 
troducing a touch of individuality or novelty. For 
somebody must write them, even if it be only the 
chairman of the manufacturing company or the 

204 



CHRISTMAS CARDS 

compositor who does the type-setting. Who are 
these mysterious people ? Are they scattered amateurs 
everywhere ? Or is it here that we find the explana- 
tion of how our professional and justly celebrated 
poets earn their Hving ? Or is this one of those in- 
dustries which are the hereditary monopoly of a 
few families like flint-knapping, vioHn-making and 
gold-beating ? Does Mr. Jones, of Putney, whose 
neighbours know him for one who " goes up to the 
City " every morning on some vague but presum- 
ably respectable business, really immure himself 
for eight hours per diem in an office in Chancery 
Lane and compose those verses which he never 
mentions at home, his father having left him a very 
valuable connection \\ith the makers ? Or — this is 
another solution — is it really that nobody has written 
any new ones for years ? 

Our enlightened capitalists are always said to be 
exploring new methods of eliminating waste. May 
it not be that it long ago occurred to one of them 
that a sufficient accumulation of Christmas verses 
was now in existence, that there was no difference 
between old ones and new ones, that nobody could 
even remember if he had seen one of them before, 
and that it was criminally extravagant to go on 
employing labour in the fabrication of a constant 
supply of new goods before the old were worn out ? 
Surely if these truths were not grasped by keen 
business minds in the old days of fat and plenty 
they must have occurred to somebody during the 
war when every ounce of effort had to be put into 
war-work, and he who mis-employed labour was 
helping the Germans. If not, are we to understand 

205 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

that the composers of Christmas verses, after five 
years' inactivity, have actually been set to work again 
at their own trade — or (awful thought) that some of 
those extraordinary tribunals exempted them as 
indispensable ? 



206 



QUOTATIONS 

MOST dictionaries of quotations are large 
and fat volumes. Only gamekeepers have 
pockets large enough to hold them, and 
they, therefore, have the drawback that they can 
only (unless their contents be memorised) be used in 
the Home or the Office. This apparently has struck 
Mr. Norman MacMunn, who has brought out a 
" Companion Dictionary of Quotations," which is 
of handy size. I have wasted — but that is an offensive 
word — a good deal of time over it since my copy 
reached me. It is full of so many good things. All 
you have to do is to think of a subject, turn to its 
entry (the work is alphabetically arranged), and 
find the totally surprising or the terribly inevitable 
things the greatest of the world's philosophers and 
poets have said about it. Who, looking up " Mad- 
ness," would expect to find the only quotation these 
lines from Dryden's " The Spanish Friar " : 

There is a pleasure 
In being mad which none but madmen know. 

Many of the entries are Hke that, and where there is 
more than one they usually contradict each other. 
Take " Failure." You gets Keats saying, " There 
is not a fiercer hell than the failure in a great object," 
and George Eliot : " The only failure a man ought 
to fear is failure in cleaving to the purpose he sees 
to be best." The sages are just like the populace 
which produces proverbs. You can justify any 
course of action with a proverb, and buttress it with 
advice from the august. This dictionary is, as it 

207 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

were, a picture of the mental confusion of man faced 
\\ith the many-sidedness of truth. A weak-minded 
reader might be utterly demoralised by it. In a book 
like this, somehow, all voices seem to speak with 
equal authority and every proposition seems to have 
the same weight. 

I like Dictionaries of Quotations. I have a taste 
for wisdom in a phrase, and any assembly of extracts 
from authors will hold me. I have been known to 
spend half a morning reading a calendar, one of 
those fat calendars' from which it is such agony to 
tear off March i or March 2, because it means 
putting into the waste- paper basket or the fire that 
sentence of Bacon or Epictetus which struck one as 
being so true, so profound, so precisely what one 
has always thought oneself. I always read the 
" Thought of the Day " in the Westminster Gazette, 
that elevating sentiment from Wordsworth or 
Mazzini, and nothing in the Observer pleases me 
more than that Httle cage of " Sayings of the Week" 
in which the best things of our wits rub shoulders 
with the most alarming predictions of our geologists 
and eugenists. I have, in fact, a passion for scraps, 
and I can read a Dictionary of Quotations as easily 
as any work in the world. But I do not regard it as 
a Dictionary, and I never gull myself into a belief 
that it is of the slightest practical utiUty to me. And 
I doubt if the greater part of any dictionary of 
quotations is useful to, or used by, anybody. There 
are remarkably few of us who ever think of quoting 
anything at all. Those who do almost invariably 
use hack quotations. And nobody would dare to 
quote, even in print, even in an anonymous leading 

208 



QUOTATIONS 

article, most of the apt allusions given by the — I'm 
sorry — quotational lexicographers . 

These dictionaries are used by journalists to verify 
quotations they know already, quotations the use 
of which is almost a matter of sacred ritual on 
certain occasions. Somebody dies. It occurs to an 
obituarist that once again a man has died, upon 
whose like, take him for all in all, we shall not look 
again. He doesn't want to risk misquotation and he 
starts a hunt, usually prolonged, through the diction- 
aries, ultimately running his quarry down under a 
heading where it has been least expected. Or ** The 
child is father of the man " comes in an author's 
head, and he can't remember whether it was Mark 
Twain or Tennyson who wrote the sentence, or has 
a vague idea that there were other words after those 
which would also be worth quoting. A reference to 
Dr. Brewer and Mr. MacMunn will put him 
straight. But don't tell me that there are many people 
who habitually, when writing articles or letters, 
look up the " subject " in a dictionary and use what- 
ever quotation comes to hand. All Mr. MacMunn 's 
quotations are interesting, but I cannot conceive 
occasions on which I shall dare use any but a few of 
them. Imagine the sensation which would be made 
if, when the fact of somebody being away was 
mentioned in conversation, I remembered my Mac- 
Munn and poignantly delivered myself of : 

Absence ! is not the soul torn by it 

From more than light, or life, or breath ? 

'Tis Lethe's gloom, but not its quiet — 
The pain without the peace of death. 

209 p 



ESSAYS AT LARGE 

And if I could not use it in conversation, I am sure 
that I could not in correspondence. There are times 
and seasons when I am sure that I should find a per- 
fect expression of my feelings in another sentence 
from Mr. MacMunn's first page, the sentence from 
Sadi's " Gulistan " : 

If the man of sense is coarsely treated by the 
vulgar, let it not excite our wrath and indignation ; 
if a piece of worthless stone can bruise a cup of 
gold, its worth is not increased, nor that of the 
gold diminished. 

Yet when, I ask, accurate though it is, am I to use 
this observation of the sagacious Oriental ? In what 
controversy ? At the foot of what retort ? It can't 
be done. And if I, a professional litterateur, with 
incorrigible leanings to the bookish, the flowery, 
the high-falutin, should find my tongue cleaving 
to the roof of my mouth when I had got as far as 
" If the man of sense," what would be the feelings 
of the less specialized person, though he might have 
learnt his MacMunn by heart ? Our optimistic 
compiler thinks he may be of assistance to school 
children, and " to the busy man or woman who 
occasionally may wish to use appropriate quotations." 
But what would one think of a grocer who should 
apologise for the sugar shortage with " The sweetest 
meats the soonest cloy," or a housemaid who should 
demurely shield off a rebuke with : 

Be to her faults a little blind 
And to her virtues very kind. 

2IO 



QUOTATIONS 

Lawyers are referred to as amongst those who are to 
be assisted. It is true that Sir E. Marshall Hall and 
others have a remarkable gift for bringing in Shake- 
speare. But even Sir Edward would scarcely have 
described his client's sufferings in the words of 
Shakespeare that Mr. MacMunn gives under the 
heading " Tears " : 

The big round tears 

Cours'd one another down his innocent nose 

In piteous chase. 

Who would dare quote this ? When ? Where ? 

The range of possible quotation, except in medita- 
tive essays, is rare. And perhaps it is just as well. 
If everybody indulged in free quotation and used a 
dictionary as a crutch all the best things that ever 
were said would be as stale as " To be or not to be," 
and we should be utterly cloyed and sickened with 
the names of the Great Dead. I have never met an 
inveterate quoter, a real devotee of these diction- 
aries. He would be more amusing as a character in 
fiction than as a companion in life. . . . My eye 
catches another quotation. It is from Goethe, and 
runs : " Can it be maintained that a man thinks 
only when he cannot think out of that which he is 
thinking." I cannot go on after that. I shall ring for a 
wet towel and settle down to it. 



211 



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